


Possessed By Light, Part One

by bodysnatch3r



Series: The Heistverse [1]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-18 04:47:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 135,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1415617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thorin Oakenshield is the son of Thrain Oakenshield, one of the richest and most influential men in all of Great Britain. He has a brother, Frerin, and a sister, Dis, who sometimes feel like they're miles away from him. He has a mother, but she's just the roses she left behind in her garden.<br/>Dwalin MacFundin is the younger brother of Balin MacFundin, Thrain Oakenshield's best friend, assistant and confidante. He has a brother he's given up on understanding and a heart that's as deep as the sea, a mother he loves fiercely and a father that's only left scars.<br/>Their worlds couldn't be more different- and as things often go, their worlds collide.<br/>What comes after is a hurricane, a forest fire, inevitable, wonderful, unstoppable.<br/>What comes after changes their lives forever.</p><p> </p><p>  <span class="small"><strong>Trigger Warnings:</strong> graphic depiction & mention of family issues, verbal/physical abuse, mental illness, drug/alcohol addiction, suicide/attempted suicide, ableism, homophobia. mention of attempted sexual assault.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> All poetry used at the beginning of each section is by Richard Siken.

## richard siken poetry
    
    
    You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shovelled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.

**(You Are Jeff)**


	2. i


      **SUMMER, 1982**
    

“Happy to be home?”

The question catches him unarmed, not ready, unprepared, off his feet, knocks him to the ground with the force of a typhoon. Thorin absent-mindedly stares at the man in the driver's seat and shrugs.

“I guess.”

He's not, there's a dull nervous ache at the bottom of his skull, a misplaced longing for freedom he is still unable to name correctly and won't be for a while- not until he stumbles and trips and lets himself fall, that is, dips his head back to accept the sin, to accept the darkness, the guilt, the eternal, shining, devastating beauty, because he will be in love, soon, maddeningly in love, desperately in love, in love with the wrong person at the right time who is also the right person at the wrong time, and achingly, horribly, terribly so. Thorin is about to let himself go, he's about to tear himself to pieces and he is about to be reborn in ash and blood and tears, and he is about to love every shaking, desperate, painstaking moment of it. But he doesn't know this.

Not now.

Not yet.

Right now, the only telltale sign is a heaviness at the base of his skull and guilt sitting on the tip of his tongue. He pulls his knees up to his chest and plays with the plastic bit at the end of his shoelaces, and he swallows, and he feels empty, and then he opens his hands and stares at the veins crisscrossing through them and at his perfectly kept nails and wonders if it's written on his face in upper-case letters, branded into his forehead, if the sin he is marking himself with even by doing something as simple as breathing is etched into his cells the same way the color of his eyes (blue, staggeringly blue, deep blue, a blue to die for, to kill for, to scream for, bloodied hands clutching a dead limp hand choking past the tears) is etched into his genetic code or if it is his fault and his alone. But it's the only doubt he will allow himself to have.

Thorin Charles Oakenshield is sixteen, and he is terrified.

Balin glances over at him out of the corner of his eye, and notices how his hair's grown longer since December (it nearly reaches his shoulders, and for a moment Balin lets himself think how the boy's father will react to it), how he seems even quieter than before, how he seems like a small, terrified, lonely thing (and yet he's one-hundred and eighty three centimeters tall and every inch of him screams the awkwardness that is being sixteen, not knowing who you are, what you want, what you're supposed to be). Thorin presses his forehead against his knees and shuts his eyes: he's exhausted despite having slept on the train, he wishes he could push his knees straight through his sternum, fold himself up so tiny he doesn't have to breathe anymore. He doesn't want to go home.

He's too scared to go home.

* * *

It starts drizzling by the time they reach Oakenshield Manor and Balin's small yellow car trudges its way up the muddy path that leads from the gates to the front door, and Thorin shivers for no reason at all except for the fact that he feels his chest cave in bit by bit, fragment by fragment, ash falling through the hole in his ribcage and filling his hollowed lungs. Balin's been humming to himself for the past fifteen minutes, a quaint little smile painted on his lips: it's his default expression, a hint of bittersweetness in a smile that always knows too much.

Every family has its secrets, after all, and sometimes it's up to close friends to keep them.

When they pull up at the archway leading to the garden and then to the main building, there's a small thing with a long dark braid waiting for them: she's twelve, curious eyes shining with a light Thorin prays will never wane, and she smiles the minute he steps out of the car.

Dis yells her brother's name before running towards him and throwing herself into his arms. He stumbles back, catching her, and laughter is forced out of his tight, tight chest. Balin, in the meantime, is unloading the car. Dis' arms squeeze tight around her brother's ribcage and he hesitates for a moment, surprised as he is by her throwing herself at him- he isn't used to being hugged this way by anyone- but finally squeezes back in return, her lean shoulders nearly disappearing within his arms. The iron band around his chest loosens a bit, but just a bit: there's still Father to meet and look in the eye, which will be (and already is) a challenge in its own right. After all he's been thinking about the man ever since he got on the train, bones growing colder as the hours flew by. He doesn't know if he'll be able to look past the guilt. He doesn't know if he'll be able to allow himself to look his father in the eye, not now that he knows _this_ about himself, not now that he's certain, not now that it is clearly set in his bones, undeniable, impossible to erase, as clear as it was on the night he realized it, staring at the ceiling and trying to force himself to swallow past the deep slow panic.

So he allows himself to concentrate on his sister's arms holding him tight, the way she presses her face against his chest and smiles whilst doing so, and “I missed you!” she chirps out, and Thorin says, “I missed you too.” in his quiet, usual way. His voice is deeper than when he left.

The hug breaks, and he sees his brother standing where his sister was just a few moments before. Thorin turns around and helps Balin with his luggage, dragging his trunk through the gravelly, muddy driveway up to the portico.

“Hey, Frer.” he says, and Frerin smiles at him but doesn't look past his glasses nor does he look up. Thorin pats him on the shoulder without thinking, Frerin flinches and pulls away and swallows. “It's good to see you, Thorin.”

Thorin smiles back (just a little strained).

Father, of course, isn't waiting outside.

* * *

The study smells of Thrain's cigars and of dust hiding within the peculiar blood-red velvet the armchairs are lined with. Thorin knocks on the nearly closed door and catches his father's silhouette in one of the armchairs, facing an unlit fireplace. It takes Thrain a few moments to notice, and it's long enough for Thorin's stomach to slowly but surely sink to the bottom of his knees. He wipes his palms on his shirt and brushes hair behind his ears, and doesn't know where to put his hands, doesn't know where to hide them and they're too large, too thin, too out of place. _He_ feels too out of place, but right now-

“Come in, Thorin.”

\- he doesn't have the time to think about it. All he needs right now is the courage to take a few steps, which he has: it's courage he keeps stowed away for most of the year, a tiny last ounce of will that kicks in each and every time he has to face his father, each and every time he has to step into a study that smells of pricey tobacco and ink. There's a window, a large one, that gives way to the garden below, that evening's rain-stained sunset already bleeding into the air around them despite the drizzle. Dust particles dance in the light. Thorin catches himself staring at them instead of the back of his father's head.

“Take a seat, Thorin.”

He does. Father looks pensive, indexes conjoined, resting against his lips. He taps them together a few times before turning towards his eldest son, who manages to shrink back within the velvet of the armchair, not enough for Thrain to notice, of course, and neither for Thorin: it's an instinct, a bad habit nurtured over the course of the years. Thorin averts his gaze for a few milliseconds giving himself the time to swallow and call upon the last ounce of bravery he has left. He meets his father's gaze somewhere in the middle, blue eyes catching a quick glimpse of ones extremely similar to his own, although only one of them is an actual eye. The other is made of glass, solid and impenetrable, a wartime heirloom, proof of Thrain Oakenshield's grandiosity and heroism, an example set in stone for his children. Thorin's been used to it all his life. He catches himself hating it sometimes, and hates himself for it.

His father sighs, leans back, Thorin stares at the empty fireplace.

“How are you, Thorin?”

If Thorin dared himself to look, he'd see a worn-down, tired man with greying hair and a well-kept beard, elegant hands (a ring with the family crest on his right one, two wedding bands, golden, on his left) so similar to Frerin's, creases lining his mouth, his forehead.

Thrain Oakenshield is a quiet man.

“All right, I guess.” he lies, and finds it surprisingly easy. His father doesn't look at him, he hardly ever does: they're both shy men and they're both more similar than anyone around them would like to admit. It worries Balin, sometimes, although he doesn't know just yet to what extent their blood is the same, the violence shimmering under their skin is the same, their uneasiness, their inability to find themselves. The Oakenshield family is a family of lost souls catching the last train to somewhere dark and grey and desolate. The Oakenshield family is a family of shattered dreamers and children neglected and loves forgotten, loves buried, loves erased. The Oakenshield family is a family that has been called insane many, many times, a falsely tight-knit group of hypocrites and liars and lost desperate empties. They race after each other, search for each other, reach for each other and kill for each other, but they never find each other. It is up to others to find them. It will always be up to others to keep them here.

Thorin hates to lie, hates how nervous it makes him, how even as a kid he could never shake off the feeling that his father just simply _knew_ , always, always, _always_ , whenever he broke a vase or ruined the tablecloth or did something equally as horrible in an eight year old's eyes (but back then his mother had been there, Valerie all bright smiles and shining eyes, his mother who would hold him close and let him sob just a little and call him her little serious man, and things were different back then, breathing was easier. Since she'd gone, the act of forcing his lungs and chest to work had become progressively harder, as it usually happens with scars you do not dress nor attend to properly. They become angry, red, thick layers of extra skin that mark souls, or wrists, or both).

Thorin hates himself for lying.

“We'll have guests this evening.”

“Who?”

“Balin and his younger brother, Dwalin. He's staying with him over the summer- I don't... approve of him, but Balin thinks it might do you well to have someone around who's closer to your age.”

“How old is he?”

“Eighteen.”

Thorin nods.

Come the end of summer, he will hate himself for a lot of things.

* * *

“You _know_ I don't like him.”

Balin glares at his brother from under the brim of his soaking wet hat and then tuts, ringing the doorbell.

“You don't _have_ to like him, all you have to do is smile at him politely and eat his food.”

Dwalin mumbles something under his breath and awkwardly shuffles his boots, mohawk stuck to the back of his neck by the storm they found themselves caught in. He buries his hands in his pockets. A butler opens the door and does a small, ridiculous curtsy, before letting the two in and taking their soaking coats and hat.

Balin smiles at Thrain, who's waiting at the foot of the staircase with his children, and in Dwalin's eyes almost seems apologetic for being completely wet, as if he'd willed the storm upon them.

“We forgot an umbrella.” Balin says, allowing a small smile to take its place his lips. Thrain clasps his hand hard and shakes it.

“It's good to see you, Balin. And thank you for picking up the boy today.”

“Oh, it was my pleasure.” the eldest MacFundin brother replies, giving Thorin a small wink that goes by undetected by his father. Thorin tries to smile back, but the awkwardness and the quiet, subtle panic that he's been feeling ever since he stepped into the house quickly smother it down.

“Thorin? This is my brother, Dwalin.”

The boy (how old did Balin say he was? Sixteen or so?) is lanky, skinny and looks so uncomfortable Dwalin's sure he'll crawl out of his own skin and slither away into the basement any moment now, as far as possible from everything and everyone. He is fretting, fingers torturing the hem of his shirt, eyes low, profile looking remarkably like his sister's (he'd caught glimpses of the other two when they'd come over to the office and he'd been there too, helping Balin file away folders or carry a particularly heavy case from one box to the other). He looks up.

The eyes are the Oakenshield's trademark piercing blue, and they already look haunted. The awkwardness of being sixteen is seared deep within his muscle, sinew and bone. Dwalin smiles at him.

Thorin swallows and outstretches a hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” he mumbles. Dwalin smiles back, and something shatters inside Thorin's brain.

* * *

The boy is pretty.

He wishes he weren't thinking that.

Thorin stares at his plate and at the strawberry cake that is resting inside of it and feels every wrong inch of his body on fire.

The boy is _pretty_ , he's got grey-blue eyes and a maddening smile that makes Thorin's stomach knot itself with both fear and desire, something he's felt over the course of the last six months or so, a bilious, mounting wave that usually starts in the lower part of his belly and claws its way through his stomach, chest and finally mouth, and he thought that once he would've left school and Andrew Burgess' awful, distracting, hellish and absolutely and pathetically _unrequited_ presence for the summer everything would've been _okay_ , but the boy sitting in front of him paints a different picture in blues, grays and the blacks of his clothes.

He swallows and knows his hands are clammy.

“You okay, Tho?”

His sister's chirp tears him away from the distressing dip of Dwalin's smiling, laughing lips and he turns towards her: she's already wolfing down her third plate, eating with the energy, joy and force that only twelve year olds have.

“Dis, careful not to dirty your dress.” their father chimes in, and Thorin's little sister expertly ignores him. Balin chuckles to himself.

“I'm... fine.” he forces his vocal chords to vibrate, and they outstandingly do. Dwalin cocks his head to the side almost unnoticeably and finds the kid sitting across from him painstakingly adorable, the same way one finds a puppy adorable, or a duckling, or any very small, very lost kind of animal.

Thorin reminds him of Frerin (what little he knows and has seen of him), although Frerin's hair is a mess of curls and Frerin avoids anyone's eye gaze and the only person who gets to touch him is Dis, when she grabs his hand and enthusiastically drags him along on this or that adventure. Thorin just seems out of place, completely.

He smiles at Thorin and winks at him over his glass of wine, and Thorin feels like something is eating its way out of his chest. This is _ridiculous_ , and yet he shuffles uncomfortably in his seat and tries to will his body to quiet down. It doesn't.

It screams louder.

Thorin suddenly wishes he could jump out of his skin and slither down to the basement, as far from everyone and everything as possible. But, as things often go, he can't.

He stares at the cake. The cake stares back.

His stomach is solidified to granite filled with cement, there is no way anything could make its way past his pinhole of a throat.

The nausea will hit anytime soon. As if to drill things in deeper, Thrain suddenly glares at his watch.

“Frerin, Dis. It's past ten. Time for bedtime.”

A piece of cake drops out of the girl's mouth as she whines, “But _Dad_ -”

“Bed. The both of you.”

Sharp stern tone that makes Thorin involuntarily flinch, no cruelty but just enough strength to add pain to the already piling mess on his shoulders. His sister grumpily drags herself off of the chair. Frerin follows her, gives a small nod to everyone.

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, lads.” Balin says back, the tenderness of a fond uncle tinting his voice. Dis enthusiastically waves at him. She grins one last time and gives Thorin an extra-tight welcome back squeeze, before being ushered out of the room by her brother.

“Now, me and Balin here have to discuss corporation matters.” Thrain says, as maids clear out the table.

A _chance_. Thorin is ready to grasp it and drag it with him under a cold, freezing, purifying shower. He can escape Dwalin MacFundin and his stupid smile and his stupid face and his stupid twinkling eyes.

“I'd like to be excuse-”

“It's time you started participating in the company's affairs too, Thorin. At least as a listener.”

“Nonsense, Thrain, the boy's just come home from school, let's give him some time to relax” Balin saves Thorin once more, picking him up and letting him breathe, “how about you show Dwalin the gardens? It seems like it's stopped raining.”, before grabbing him by the neck and slamming him full-force headfirst into the ground.

In truth, Balin is worried because Thorin is lonely. He knows having him meet Dwalin could potentially become a complete disaster (and he doesn't know how _bad_ things are going to get, how sweet, intoxicating and utterly forbidden) but Dwalin might benefit from something a bit more stable than squatters, redskins and homeless punks. Not that he criticizes Dwalin for his lifestyle choices: his friends are his friends, and Balin knows the boy's mature enough to realize when he's making a mistake.

He just doesn't... fully approve of them.

Thorin takes a breath he knows is much too sharp and much too panicked, before glancing towards Dwalin, who looks slightly more nervous than earlier, but then Thorin quickly tells himself it's just a trick of his tired, screaming brain.

* * *

Dwalin sighs awkwardly and rubs the back of his neck with his hand, swallows and gives a small little lopsided smile Thorin decides to ignore.

"I'm sorry my brother's... sort of forced this whole thing onto you. I understand we're not really-"

"Compatible?" Thorin asks, and they both know he's referencing the combat boots and the mohawk, the tattoos and the pierced ears.

"Ye... yeah." Dwalin looks as embarrassed as he is. He pulls a cigarette out of the package and offers one to Thorin, who shrugs in refusal. There's crickets and the air is pleasant- it smells of wet grass, and Oakenshield is happy that it's dark, because he knows his cheeks are blazing red. _That's what happens when he talks to strangers_.

"Good boy. These things'll kill you."

That's what happens when he talks to cute boys. And God, his head is swimming in nothing right now.


	3. ii

The water is cold, but not cold enough-  _never_  cold enough, no, never holy enough to wash him clean, never glorifying enough to make his dirtied hands shine anew.

 _Mother have mercy_ , he presses a hand to his filthy mouth, naked standing in the middle of the shower, empty, drowning empty, shaking empty. The nausea, mixed with the last overwhelming tendrils of self-inflicted pleasure makes his head spin-

 _he thought of boys while doing it_ , and the cold did not scorch it down, the same way the heat will not freeze it solid in the lower part of his belly blissfully quiet (believe me, _he's tried_ ), the thought is too overwhelming to keep out.

They do not have specific identities: nameless, faceless, dream-like bodies and hands that in his sinner's mind substitute themselves to his own and drag him underwater until the lack of oxygen makes his head spin so hard he emerges gasping, staggering forward, choking a louder moan back into the dark vault of his throat, boys who do not exist that he leeches off and feeds on when the need gets too dark, too imperative, too shameful.

The nausea takes over, and he is no longer drowning in simple water: he is drowning in his own chest, lungs filling with sickly fluid, sucked in by a relentless vacuum of shame. Thorin violently, suddenly, turns the water off and stands cold, hair rising on his arms and legs, he steps out. It seems to take him years- somewhere, his sister laughs loudly and stomps after what Thorin suspects is the family dog- and he sits on his bed, and feels his arms and hands suddenly give up any and all movement. He is a puppet, for a second, as he lets shame crawl through his skin and gnaw away at his muscles.

He stares at sunlight as it kisses the tips of his toes and then shyly rushes back into its corner, a lazy, single cloud passing over it for a brief moment. He stares at his room, at his unpacked empty suitcase, he stares at the books in a corner and at the photograph of his mother and he stares at his already written diaries all neatly stacked in a corner, and then he stares at his newest one, plainly sitting on his desk, and wonders if he should burn it, full of shame and blood and a sixteen year old boy's fears.

He won't, but for a second his mind itches towards the matches in the kitchen drawer and the possibility of exorcising himself through ritualistic teenage arson. 

It leaves a bitter feeling in his throat he is not entirely unaccustomed to.

Thorin buries his face in his hands, rakes his fingers through his wet hair (the knots prick as they come undone) and then sighs loudly, to nothing.

He gropes for a t-shirt and the first pair of pants he can find, as loose as they can be, but he still feels something, and he wishes he didn't have to.

He feels nausea drip into frustration, sadness and rage- and this too is something he is not entirely unaccustomed to.

* * *

Dis is sitting, cross-legged, on the table, dark hair spilling over her like a curtain, brow furrowed as she seems to be every bit concentrating on the drawing she's scrawling into her sketchbook (it is, not unsurprisingly given the sounds he previously heard, a portrait of Charlotte, the family's English Foxhound, who is currently lying on her back in the middle of the wooden floor, paws outstretched in the unmistakeable manifesto of perfect bliss). Thorin trudges past the pair and makes his way to the fridge.

"You're late." his sister comments without actually looking at him, "Father was disappointed you missed breakfast."

"Get off of the table."

"Don't feel like it."

Thorin scowls at her because it is his duty and feels his chest constrict. He senses a bite of exasperation masked as cruelty dangerously close to his tongue, already sharpened, ready to draw blood, but stills it with a much too generous gulp of orange juice: it hurts his chest when he swallows. He leans against the counter and eyes the morning paper. 

"Where's Frer?" he asks, frowning at the clock that signs half past ten.

"His room."

"Father?"

"His study."

Thorin pushes a piece of toast into the toaster. Putting food into his stomach might be the worst idea possible, given the state of it currently, but he's been barely eating for the whole week (ever since he got home), barely sleeping, shaky and nervous and fidgety. And people will notice, and people will ask questions, and he'll have to lie, and the guilt will just grow.

He waits for the toast to pop out, puts it on a plate and then walks past his sister and dog again, not before rubbing Charlotte's tummy first and then ruffling up Dis' hair: she squeals in protest and tries to bat his hands away and although his throat is filled with cotton balls, Thorin can't help but crack out a smile.

He doesn't bother saying good morning to Thrain: he knows the man is busy. He quickly peeks into Frerin's room and finds him engrossed in a book on horses and decides against bothering him.

It is, after all, a beautiful day: he might just as well take a stroll through the park. It might help him breathe.

Heaven knows he needs it.

* * *

He finishes his toast, leaves the plate on his desk (it sets off a small alarm bell in his brain but he decides that he'll clean it up as soon as he comes back inside, and that calms the guilt a little) and then makes his way downstairs.

The old wood his home is made of creaks and moans under his bare feet, paintings of ancestors and his grandfather and his father, too, of course, when Thrain was younger and less grey staring down at him as he climbs down the stairs and tries to avoid the pinpricks of anxiety those piercing sets of eyes have always made him feel. He opens the glass doors that lead to the veranda and relishes in the sudden outburst of warm air.

He smiles because no matter how deep he dunks his head underwater, sunlight always makes him feel alive. 

Thorin paces around the blooming park and breathes in fresh oxygen as deep as he can, feels his tight-wound ribs expand, (drink it in like poison any other day), and the feeling of dread loosens for a second that he soon realises can be prolonged with every breath he takes. It is a funny mixture of wanting to live and wanting to die, of anxiety and absolute happiness that catches him unaware and that, not for the first time, not for the last, he pushes aside, does not dwell on. All he does is walk.

Mindlessly, enough to clear his head, he kicks a rock and it rolls for a few feet up the gravel path. Thorin buries his hands in his pockets and decides to cut through the grass despite it being not allowed: he'll take a left at the garage and clamber his way up his favourite tree. He needs to think things through. He needs to ignore himself in favour of warmth and the smell of grass and his body detaching itself from him, floating into nothingness, into the sky, into the blue, mating meeting mingling with clouds.

Charlotte suddenly trots up next to him and nuzzles and licks his hand. He grins and ruffles her fur. 

"I'll race you if you'll race me."

The dog wags her tail in excitement.

Charlotte was his mother's and will always be his mother's: they are surrogates, the kids and Thrain, lukewarm confronted with the sunstorm and dustdance that Valerie was in the eyes of that dog. They are trying to make the best they can.

It's only been five years.

Charlotte yaps after her owner's son as Thorin makes a mad dash towards the garage where his father keeps his bikes and cars, relishing in the feeling of oxygen burning his lungs and emptying his thoughts, and he turns the corner, and then-

"Hey there. Where you running at?"

Thorin abruptly stops and nearly trips, gravel flying up as his feet desperately scramble for purchase. Charlotte nearly crashes into him, and they almost end up both sprawled on the ground. His breath catches in his throat and his hair falls in front of his eyes. He stops, swallows, shakes his head to focus his gaze, and meets Dwalin with an eyebrow arched, his arms crossed and a lopsided grin that's all pushed to the right of his face. His mohawk's messy and sweaty, his hands are dirty with grease.

He's not wearing a shirt.

That's the first, second, third, fourth, eleventh, twelfth and  _millionth_ thing Thorin notices, and it hits him all of a sudden like a kick to the centre of his forehead, and for exactly three seconds he stares at nothing but Dwalin's broad shoulders, the way the neck slopes into them with bestial grace, his Adam's apple, his nipples, how he'd like to _lick them_ oh Christ don't think it,  _don't you dare think it_.

Thorin's mouth suddenly goes dry.

"...Hi."

The word is a knife that slices his tongue in two. He mutters it out in a cascade of blood.

"Hey there," Dwalin nonchalantly replies, and goes back to rummaging under the car's hood (it's a 1956 Jaguar Roadster, or, as Frerin likes to call it, " _One of dad's obnoxious rich men's cars._ ") without even stopping to give Thorin even half a glance (the truth is, he's observing him out of the corner of his eye, and he's smiling very small, because now that he can see Thorin in broad daylight, those blue eyes are shining in such a screaming, particular, even _pretty_  way he hadn't noticed before. The other thing he notices is how Thorin is turning a very bright shade of red very very quickly, and this makes him smile too).

"Why are you... here?" Oakenshield asks, eyes not leaving the curve of Dwalin's right arm as it twists to follow his wrist, flowing into a strong, steady hand.

The boys he dreams of have no faces, but all of a sudden Thorin realises this might change. He swallows, and terror goes down with his saliva, attaches itself to the lining of his stomach and Thorin thinks there is the very sudden possibility he might throw up. He breathes as hard as he can for this _not_ to happen- and so stares at the car in front of him.

"Your dad asked if I could fix his Roadster. It's a pretty car."

Thorin realises that Dwalin pronounces his  _r'_ s rounded, and of course he does, because he's Scottish, and he's pretty, and he's fucking, goddamn  _shirtless_. Thorin ignores Charlotte as she trots around his feet, demanding attention. As it is, he's currently being distracted by something else, or rather _someone_ else, covered in sweat and grime, who sports a healthy stubble and tattoos on his arms (Thorin counts three on the left, two on the right) and one on his chest, which he incidentally can't stop staring at, and the more he stares at the crude stick'n'pokes, the more he thinks about licking Dwalin's neck, and the more he thinks about making his way from his neck to his chest to his nipples, the more he knows his cheeks are blazing, and the more he thinks about  _how_ exactly flicking Dwalin's nipples with his tongue would probably feel, the more  _other_ parts of his body react to the thought.

Being a hormone-ridden, anxious sixteen year old can at times be horribly exhausting. 

Thorin tries to steady his breathing and quickly realises he's hardly breathing at all. Dwalin cocks his head to the side and Thorin stares at those grey eyes as they flick over his face (he does not notice the small amused speck that dances in their depths) and wishes a trapdoor would open up under his feet right about  _now_ and swallow him to the middle of the Earth where he would happily dissolve in the its core's subatomic temperatures.

Or, alternatively, he would very gladly move to Tibet right _about now_ , or Australia, or the moon, or  _anywhere else that isn't his father's stupid garage_ , especially if he has to deal with Dwalin MacFundin. Who is very cute.

And also currently very shirtless.

"Are you. Are you all right?" Dwalin asks.

"Me? Me? I'm fine," Thorin coughs and lowers his eyes, feels his cheeks burn and his eyes water, " _perfectly_. Fine."

He pulls himself up.

"I'm fine, really."

Dwalin looks at him with his brow furrowed and the look of a person who is very much not at all convinced by what the other's saying. He wipes his hands on the cloth he had stuffed in his jeans' waist and only smudges the grease up to his elbows. 

The awkward silence is even more bone-crushing than either of them expected. Thorin happens to notice that Dwalin carries a self-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear, blinks at it and uses it to distract himself for a few seconds.

He swallows dryly.

"So." Dwalin starts, before stopping, as he notices Thorin's eyes widen with absolute  _terror_.

He needs to get out of there. He needs to get out of there  _now_ , before his heart implodes and his brain melts and he finds himself reduced to a small, pitiful pile of ash.

"Well I need to. Uh. I need to go." Thorin suddenly blurts out, " _Bye_." before turning around as fast as he can and quickly starting to walk back the way he came from. Charlotte yaps at Dwalin and then trots after Oakenshield.

Suddenly, something much smaller than Thorin collides head-first with his stomach.

" _DIS_!" he yells, absolutely taken by surprise, as his sister untangles herself from the mess of gangly limbs they both are.

" _What are you doing here_?"

"I was looking for Chuck," she answers, smiling at the dog once she sees here, "and I found her."

Thorin nervously smiles at her. She stares at him, quizzical.

"Are you all right?" she asks.

"I'm  _fine_." Thorin snaps back, pushing his way past her.

Dis might've said hi to Dwalin, too, but Thorin isn't sure, not one bit, not at all. His cheeks are blazing, his hands are shaking, his ears are ringing.

And he knows that from now on the boys will have faces, and hands he knows the shape of, and a specific voice, and grey eyes.

And this terrifies him.

(This thrills him to no end, forbidden fruit just a wisp of smoke away from being tasted).


	4. iii

Thorin stares at his breakfast (eggs and toast) and eyes his father, whose lean fingers are mopping up egg yolk with a small piece of bread. His brother and sister have long gone, run off to the forbidden freedom of rolling in grass, staining clothes, shrieking with liberating laughter.

Thrain has different plans for Thorin, though: his father clears his throat, wipes his mouth and fingers with the same icy, sad elegance he does everything else (except for _rage_ , but Thrain hardly ever gives into rage: his weapon of choice is disappointment, sleek and cruel and quick to make one bleed, too quick, too sharp, often paralyzing) and sets the napkin aside. Thorin feels nervous, and this fear makes him guilty.

“You haven't eaten.” Thrain says quietly, and there is almost ( _almost_ ) concern instead of reproach in his voice, tenderness even is almost shown.

Thorin shrugs.

“Not hungry.”

“You've been quiet.”

He has.

“I'm just tired.”

He is.

“I was wondering if... if you felt like coming to the offices this morning.”

Thorin looks up from his plate and curls around his mug of coffee, the warmth working as a makeshift sense of not being a hollow shell heavily carried around by what he guesses are bones, and not simple rods of teenage weariness and adult guilt. Thrain is _trying_ and Thorin knows this, Thorin _knows_ he's different from last December, he knows he is as quiet as ever, as shy, smaller despite being so tall. But Thorin feels so trapped, there is so much heavy noise in his head, and he doesn't want anyone to break in through it, because if Father finds out it is over, and a boy who loves a boy in this world, in _his_ world, is a dead boy.

Thorin doesn't want to crawl outside, doesn't want to subject the world to the disgusting thing he is.

He knows he has to.

“I have studying to do.”

“You can bring your books along.”

He feels so utterly ridiculous, because some part of him knows there's a way to calm his raging chest, but he is so much in hiding that he needs to deny it down to every single atom, lest he explode, although he is aware he has convinced himself to deep down know that stolen water tastes the sweetest, and he'd be stealing from himself and _for_ himself- _but maybe he's not even gay_ _maybe it's nothing but lust_ and it is, also, but Dwalin is _handsome_ , Dwalin smiles, Dwalin dazzles.

And Thorin knows that to calm it all down all it would take is a kiss.

 _But maybe he's not even gay_.

But he wants him.

But he doesn't want to want him.

* * *

There are pats on the back and handshakes, smiles, “you've grown so much!”-es, “you look just like your father!”-es, questions about school and life and girls.

Thorin smiles, strained, fears that all they're doing is seeing right through him, and then someone will tell his father, and everything will just burn, and burn, and burn. Balin smiles at him from his desk as his father talks to someone big and important he could care less about, Thorin stares out the window and silently enjoys the company of a quiet, harmless plant. The water cooler next to the two is right in front of MacFundin's open office door.

“How you doing, lad?”

Balin's smile is honest in a way that always disarms and confuses Thorin, who always thinks he doesn't deserve it, who, right now, is absolutely _certain_ he doesn't deserve it.

Not with the lie that he is.

“All right, I guess.”

“Do you need a space to work?” Balin asks, eyeing Thorin's book bag.

“Oh, I-”

“Relax, I've got a meeting with your dad in five minutes anyway.”

“ _Balin_ -”

Favors make him heavy, favors make him scared.

“Really. It's fine. Just as long as you answer the phone and file away all those papers over there-” he chuckles at Thorin's frowning- “I'm just joking. All you have to do is file the papers.”

Thorin fidgets.

“Oh, _all right_. You'll just have to file _half_ of the papers.”

Thorin smiles and even snorts out a laugh as he sets his bag down.

“Thanks, Balin.”

“Ah, it's my pleasure, lad. Besides, now that I have you I no longer have to pay a secretary.”

He winks at Thorin as he shuts the door behind him with a soft click. Thorin stares at the frosted glass set into the door, _BALIN MACFUNDIN_ written on it backwards from inside and then sighs to himself. He digs through his book bag and pulls out his Mathematics manual and a notebook.

Thorin grits his teet.

“All right. _Here we go_.”

* * *

He lets his forehead fall with a thunk against the desk. Next to him, a pile of crumpled up paper is staring at him sadly.

“Jesus. Fucking. Shitting. Christ. Fuck. _Fuck this_.”

Thorin lets out an exasperated moan and starts slamming his head very slightly against the wood of the desk.

“Why.”

 _Thunk_.

“Are.”

 _Thunk_.

“You.”

 _Thunk_.

“So.”

 _Thunk_.

“Fucking.”

 _Thunk_.

“INCOMPREHENSIBLE.”

“Need help?”

Thorin's head shoots up and he hits it against the desklamp. The office chair rolls back, pushed by his own momentum, and he, quite simply, nearly falls off.

“What? No? No. I'm fine.”

Thorin clumsily grasps for purchase onto the shiny mahogany of Balin's desk and the person that's standing in the doorway is – _ohshitfuckshitshitshit_ – Dwalin, holding what looks like a box full of index cards. He's wearing a jacket to cover the tattoos on his arms and a shirt, too, which is _so much better_ and _so much more disappointing_ than no shirt at all, and his mohawk is down, and Thorin wants to hide under the desk.

 _Boom_ \- his heart rate reaching an unbearable speed and his cheeks go red, immediately.

He is very, _very_ bad at this whole crush business.

Dwalin eyes him and shifts the box in his arms so that it's resting against his hip.

“You sure?”

And then Thorin's tongue takes over, kicks his Maths-fried brain out of the way, takes hold of his mouth and makes him blurt out:

“How much do you know about goniometry?”

“ _Excuse me_?”

“Sine. Cosine. Tangent. That stuff.”

Dwalin places the box on his brother's desk and peers over Thorin's shoulder at his notebook. He furrows his brow and moves closer, and his cheek is dangerously close to Thorin's, and for a moment Thorin thinks how kissing him would feel like, how biting slightly down onto his bottom lip would feel like, how tracing his lips with his tongue would feel like.

He feels his cheeks blaze again, deeper, hotter, redder.

“All right. Hold up.”

Thorin realizes this entire situation is running out of hand and the speed of a million miles an hour as Dwalin pulls up a chair next to him and grabs his notebook and a pencil.

“You messed up here.”

Thorin has to force himself to stop staring at Dwalin's profile and jawline and throat and actually concentrate on his homework.

“Where?”

“Here.”

He partially succeeds, losing himself into the growling depths of Dwalin's voice instead.

Dwalin shows him a mangled mess of an equation.

“Sixty degrees is pi thirds, not pi sixths.”

Thorin stares at the piece of paper blankly, his ears filled with the sound his heart is making as it sweels.

He is, once again, quite sure he is on the verge of vomiting (it is funny, he thinks, how easily Dwalin can trigger his gag reflex).

“Oakenshield.”

“Huh? Yeah. Right. _Pi sixths_.”

“Is actually pi thirds.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Thorin nods, utterly unconvincing. Dwalin arches an eyebrow and clears his throat.

“Do you... want me to check the rest of your problems?”

Thorin blinks a few times and MacFundin suddenly realizes he's having a hard time not staring at how the light can fracture such a simple colour as blue into the myriad of facets that are Thorin's eyes.

“Uh. Sure.”

Thorin is walking in a minefield right now and he _knows it_ but he is unable to stop himself. The car is speeding too fast and the brick wall is much too close, there is no use in hitting the brakes now. He thinks he didn't know wanting to kiss a boy so bad counted as self destruction, but he is living walking talking thinking proof it does, it does, it _does_ , absolutely, without an inch of doubt. He is drunk on blood right now- and it is his own.

When Dwalin's done correcting, he sighs and puts Thorin's notebook down. He stares at Thorin. Thorin stares back. Dwalin taps the pen against the desk and then says:

“Listen- how about I give you a hand with this stuff?”

“...That bad, huh?”

Dwalin tries to find the right words to put it politely, but Thorin precedes him with a cynical giggle.

“It's fine, I know.”

Thorin didn't think he could need a kiss so viscerally as he does right now, never thought he could find it so hard to speak because there's a knot around his neck and his tongue, he knows this, his tongue needs to search for Dwalin's, his lips need to find his, explore them, taste them, every inch and millimeter, not think for a moment that Thorin knows that if it were allowed to happen would last a million years, tasting of manna, tasting of nectar and ambrosia, and suddenly his chest aches, his hands ache, his throat aches for a kiss he knows he is not allowed to have.

 _It's just lust_.

If this is just lust then he wants it stronger tenfold, if this is just lust then he hates it with all his might, he knows from the very start he is chronically addicted. And so his tongue takes hold of his fickle brain and out it stumbles,

“Sure. _Sure_. Why not.”

“All right. Great.”

“Friday, three PM? The Manor's library?”

“Perfect.”

Is this a date?

 _Is this a date_?

Does _Maths_ count as a date?

Is he going to go on a date despite the million warning bells that are going off in his head, a deafening cacophony of emptiness?

(Does _Maths_ _really count_ as a date?)

* * *

Dwalin stops at the bottom of the stairs to light his cigarette as his brother pulls the car up to the entrance of the Oakenshield Corporation main building's entrance.

“Those're bad for you,” Balin says, glaring at the cigarette dangling from his little brother's lip. Dwalin shrugs and takes his jacket off and puts it in the back of the car. He sits next to his brother and moves Balin's briefcase back with his jacket whilst doing so.

“Make sure it's closed.”

“It is, no worries.”

Balin clicks his tongue and Dwalin rolls his eyes at him and then rolls his window down: his brother _hates_ the smell of smoke. Dwalin leans back and sighs, watches London as it immerses itself in dusk and rushes by. It is quiet, and calming, confusing in a way. Dwalin rubs the bridge of his nose and tries to blink out the image of Thorin- but for some reason it's stuck to his brain and insists on not letting go. There's something sticky-sweet in the eyes and the flurry of fingers and hands as Thorin talks, so Dwalin tries to rub it out to no avail.

All he does is attract Balin's attention.

“You all right?”

“Fine. Just tired.”

“I saw you talking to Thorin earlier.”

 _Jesus_.

Dwalin scoffs and nods a little, “Yeah. Yeah.”

“So?”

“So what?”

"What's he like?"

“He's... nice (blue eyes glistening bright, their colour so loud in his head he couldn't even hear himself think), I guess. Utterly shit at Maths,” Dwalin's laugh sounds a little convinced, this time around. Balin smiles.

“I offered to help with his homework.”

Balin's smile widens.

“And will you?”

Dwalin shrugs, it's funny, he thinks. It's funny and scary how Thorin Oakenshield is _cute_ , maddeningly cute, how it's clear as day Thorin's got a crush on him, how Dwalin's chest nearly seems to flutter when he occasionally thinks about him, how his chest is just about ( _just about_ ) to cave in.

Dwalin hasn't had a crush in so long, just a string of disappointing boys he'd expertly wrapped around his fingers.

“He said yes.”

“Good. _Good._ He needs it.”

“Are you talking about the Maths, or-”

But Dwalin immediately knows it's something else: Thorin needs a friend.

That's what else that's been putting him off ever since he got a good look at those eyes: there is a particular deep azure labelled _sad_ in his brain, Thorin looks sad.

Thorin looks lonely.

Dwalin sighs and rubs his face with his free hand and dangles his arm out of the open window and smiles to himself his cracked, pushed-to-the-side smile, this time there's a hint of bitterness he cannot really place, and he just shakes his head. 


	5. iv

Dwalin slams him against a wall- and Thorin's legs wrap around his hips, Thorin digs his fingers into the other's mohawk, he feels Dwalin rake his teeth along his neck, he whimpers, relishes in the feeling of tooth against flesh that will _stain_ that will _leave a mark_ and God he couldn't care less, right now he couldn't care less- his hands dig into Dwalin's shirt and Dwalin thrusts against him, makes him moan so viciously so vulgarly but there's clothes, _too many layers between them_ , he needs to feel Dwalin against him, fully, skin against skin making his mind split in two-

“Oakenshield.”

and he whimpers when Dwalin presses his lips to his, Thorin's head spins, maddening, he starts pulling his shirt off, his back arches when Dwalin runs his tongue against his lower lip-

“ _Oakenshield_.”

Thorin looks up from the table he's staring at and blinks, once, twice, clears his mind and shifts in his seat as he feels frustration and pleasure both build up between his legs, _curse being sixteen, curse having wants and needs_. He stares at Dwalin, who's cocked his head to the side, eyebrow arched.

“You all right?”

Thorin wraps his hands around his coffee mug and tightens his shoulders, “I'm... fine. Why?”

Dwalin shrugs, “You looked... you know. Lost.”

Thorin furrows his brow and stares at the floor right next to Dwalin for a second, cools his hands for a second with scalding ceramic, doesn't move, doesn't exist, barely breathes in the quiet clicking of a faulty faucet. The sound hurts his brain. His Maths book is next to him, neatly closed, paper neatly stacked under it, exercises done, re-done, corrected and done once more. He stares at a small corner of paper that's folding over a two angrily crossed out, he'd crossed it out, he'd tried to erase it from the face of the earth after the millionth time he'd been unable to get the equation right, and Dwalin had giggled, and someplace somewhere a pained doe had screamed her prayer to the sky as she bled onto the forest floor. He is not poetic. He is not deep. He is not different.

He is sad, he is sad, he is sad.

Dwalin finishes his coffee and then stands up, and even the chair creaking in the quiet kitchen sounds vulgar. He pets Charlotte's head, who barks at him and then noses his hip for more, and then he cracks his knuckles, looks at Thorin, sees a reflection of his own inexplicable uneasiness. He looks at the grip of those hands around the steaming mug and cannot avoid finding them pretty, not _delicate_ , too webby to be delicate, but pretty, _yes_ , something he'd love to hold maybe, even, and dare himself to look at Thorin's eyes properly whilst doing so. Thorin doesn't look at him while he stands up and this gives Dwalin a chance to indulge in tasting the blue of his eyes for a few seconds, and digging through them must not be good for him, when Thorin cannot notice the way Dwalin relentlessly walks into the water up to his thighs and relishes in the delicate chirping of waves, despite what he initially intended, despite how stupid it is of him to think he can allow himself to indulge in it forever. He will not allow himself to want some things- too scared, too uncertain, too stubborn. Dwalin pulls back from the thoughts, pulls back from the water, stands on the shore. He will not fall for a boy with sadness in his eyes, he will not tell himself he is the one destined to save him: nothing good ever came from that.

Dwalin says, “Thanks for the coffee,” and “see you next week?” and Thorin smiles and nods at both, a perfect synchronized package of badly-hidden anxiety, betrayed by those hands, by those quick hands, betrayed by the darting eyes, by the poetry of his nervous tongue, the music of a merciless God that placed so much weight in a simple colour, Dwalin is not supposed to fall in love, Dwalin didn't think he could fall in love over the course of three weeks, but here they are, standing on the shore, here they are, staring at the moon, here is Thorin, pointing at the moon he does not care for.

Dwalin lights a cigarette as he walks outside and waves at Dis who's sitting cross-legged in the grass. Here he is, following the tracks the moon left behind itself. Here he is, sifting for Thorin's footprints in the sand.

Here he is, here they are, here it begins, and walks behind them like a stag with much too heavy antlers.

* * *

Thorin pushes the mug away and buries his head in his arms, head that is pounding, head that is swimming, head that is scaring him, bleeding him, ripping him apart.

Head that is empty except for grey-blue eyes and a crooked, lopsided smile.

Head that betrays him.

His fingers scrape against the wood and some desperate part of him hopes that he will break a nail and bleed and thus cleanse the sin- a sin that has not been consummated ( _yet_ ), a sin purely of the mind, flesh unscathed, unscarred, pristine-perfect, and yet if he could he'd clean himself with acid every night, angry holes burned into his hands that desire, into his legs that want, into his dick that needs, into his dirty dirty mind that imagines. The rhythm of the phrase against his tongue is so wrong, too wrong, Thorin buries his fingers in his hair and tugs and whines and ignores Charlotte that rests her chin on his knee and nobody is supposed to walk in right now, no one is allowed to see him like this, and he grabs himself up from the floor, he drags himself out of the grey-blue sky, he wonders what fire tastes like, for a fleeting moment tells himself that is what Dwalin tastes of.

* * *

It burns.

Like the ravenous stream that pulls you under and drowns you with her sweetest kiss, like hands dunked in icewater, like the tips of his fingers going numb and then screaming and then blinking themselves out of existence.

It crushes his chest.

Today it hurts more than he could imagine: because lust has slipped into pain, and pain is slipping into nothing, it is obliterating him inch by inch in such ways he did not believe possible. Thorin did not know it was going to hurt this much- it hurt before, too, yes, obviously, but this pain is different. This is making his hands shake every time they nearly brush against Dwalin's and he feels gravity fight against his own will and demand they touch, just once, just once enough to quiet his aching skin.

One touch means oblivion, though, one touch means never being able to stop.

Thorin is finding it hard to breathe, today, he's finding it hard to concentrate, because all he wants and needs is Dwalin, Dwalin in a way that makes him dream of stars (and stars are not as sinful as sex, stars are precious, stars are pure), that makes him want to scream his pain, that makes his chest expand and trap his nerves and trap him within itself. His chest grows thicker, heavier by the breath, scar tissue binding it still in its place. He doesn't hear Dwalin's voice, it is like the sound bat's wings make in the dead of night, it is a drone, a screech, too loud too quiet too soft Thorin knows goniometry is the last of his issues, right now.

“Thorin, are you listening?”

_Thorin_ not Oakenshield, Thorin, just Thorin now, his name a symphony when spoken by Dwalin- God he did not know he could hurt this much, he did not know his thin shoulders could be crushed by so much weight, the weight of living and loving and knowing that _he will never be loved back_ , no matter how hard he tries.

Dwalin is finding it harder to breathe, today, he is finding it harder to concentrate, because all he wants and needs is Thorin, Thorin in a way that makes him want to brush his lips against the other boy's, taste him, dip his head back, wrap his hands around his wrists and kiss, kiss, _kiss until they're sore_ and then kiss again, just for good measure, just because he does not feel like he exists today and something tells him Thorin's lips hold the key to making him real again.

Instead he asks, “Thorin, are you listening?” and Thorin nods back at him, smiling, twirling his pen between those webby, not-pretty fingers, and Dwalin stares at them a bit too long. He clears his throat.

Thorin knows there is something inside of him: a live bird, maybe, set it free, a scared bunny, set it free, open the gates and let it out, let it find its way home, because something right under his sternum is thumping so loud, and oh God it scares him, oh God he needs to breathe properly and does not know how to, there is so much rushing under his skin, inside his bloodstream, red-hot and azure-white and fuzzy and thrilling and it makes his skin tingle.

He is in love, it is making his head spin.

The sensation of falling sometimes precedes the notion of flying.

The flight catches you, the flight liberates you, the flight elevates you and turns you into gold.

The light falls across Thorin's face and fills his eyes with flecks of yellow, and as Dwalin's explaining something he notices this, and it kicks him in the face, it is a voiceless prayer to whatever God has placed them both in the same room in this precise moment, and all of a sudden the words die in the back of Dwalin's throat.

The Oakenshield library falls quiet. In the interval between breathing and deciding, Thorin feels as if he is falling.

He falls while he leans over, plummeting towards his demise, he falls as he shuts his eyes, he falls as he realizes he does not know how to kiss, he falls, water roaring through his ears and canceling every other sound out of his system.

He falls when his lips brush against Dwalin's cheek and he thinks _this is it, this will kill me_.

He flies when Dwalin turns his head, when Dwalin does not give him time to breathe, when Dwalin presses his lips to his, and Thorin feels MacFundin's fingers brush against his neck, and there is a breath, and again, they kiss, he is kissed and he kisses.

Dwalin tastes nothing of fire. Dwalin tastes of himself, nothing more, nothing less, and he tastes of all the hitched breaths Thorin had to hide inside himself throughout the last month or so, he tastes of all the crooked smiles, all the cocky grins.

Thorin's head suddenly feels as if it has been split in two, and everything inside it is spilling out. His heart gallops after the stream, neighing, panicked, he can feel his own heartbeat tear through the veins in his throat, and his hands are shaking, and the kiss won't end, and he does not want it to end.

He thinks of father.

The wings stop beating. The heart stops bumping.

He falls, terrified his mind screams, Thorin suddenly breaks the kiss. There is a moment in which his lips hover close to Dwalin's, and then all of a sudden he stumbles into fear's icy cold waters, and he's grabbing his books and his papers and pens, and rushing out of the library.

The cold in his bones translates in burning bright red on his cheeks. He makes it to his room and slams the door shut behind him and sinks to the floor with his back against it, heart pounding, hands slightly trembling, homework tumbling to the floor with him.

He tries to catch his breath.

Thorin stares at the wall and drinks in everything that's just happened, and tendrils of Dwalin's taste are still wrapped around his tongue, his smell still fills his nostrils.

Something chirps at the base of his throat.

Thorin laughs, and the sound is also a prayer in its own right. 

* * *

It is two AM and he cannot sleep. It is two AM, and Thorin's mind is a whirlpool of guilt and joy and the thrill of doing something forbidden, like setting something on fire, igniting his heart and his bones in this case, his mind, his ugly, spider-like hands. He stares at the ceiling and does not see it- no lights are on. The darkness is a cool, crystalline, perfect pool of water not even wind dares come close to.

And then someone starts throwing gravel at it.

There's the first clack of it against his bedroom window, and Thorin briskly turns towards it but then turns back to staring at the ceiling and feeling his chest both cave in and expand at maniacal speed.

Only that then there's another one, and another one, a fourth, a fifth and then a whole handful of them, and in the coolness of August nights Thorin stands up and opens his window.

He can hardly make out who's standing underneath but he already knows who it is.

“It's two AM.”

“I know.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk.”

“How did you get past the security dogs?”

Dwalin holds up a plastic bag that Thorin can't see in the darkness but can hear: the sound of tin cans rolling against each other. Dog food.

“I'm used to guard dogs.”

“What do you _want_ , MacFundin?”

“Come down.”

Thorin hesitates.

“Please? It's important.”

The ghost of the roughness and softness of his lips against his own suddenly haunts Thorin, and he swallows, and he knows he needs more, he knew this was going to happen, he let himself fall, stupidly, and some part suddenly wishes he hadn't, he balls his fists and thinks about burying his fingers in Dwalin's mohawk.

Thorin quietly creeps out of his room, barefoot, and down the stairs, around the house until he's under his window. He can see Dwalin better now- his mohawk's down, he's smiling, he's wearing a hoodie, small details, small details, Thorin wonders if he'd dreamt how calloused and wondrous Dwalin's hands are, or if they actually did touch him.

Dwalin is smoking. Dwalin stares absent-mindedly at somewhere in the general are of Thorin's chest, covered by a much too large t-shirt, and then begins, which is, in all conversations, the most difficult thing to do.

“Listen. About the kiss.”

“I'm sorry, you're right, it was stupid.”

Thorin says it so fast it nearly merges into a single word, and Dwalin stares at him, bewildered. His heart is starting to pound fast again, but he needs to ignore it for the time being.

“What? No. No. It was ( _what i wanted_ ) okay, it was fine, it was... it was what I'd been thinking of doing for a while.”

Thorin stares at him and gulps.

“I didn't mind it. What I minded was you abandoning me afterwards like a fucking idiot.”

Thorin stares at his hands. His feet are bare. He's getting cold.

“I'm scared.”

Not _was_ . Not _got_ . I _am_ , present-tense. I am still scared. I will be scared for a very, very long while.

“I've never... I've never done something like this.”

Dwalin hesitates, seems to think about what he's going to say next.

“Do you want to just... forget about it?”

The regret is raspy and deep, it makes itself heard, and matches the regret that suddenly assails Thorin, who shakes his head and is shaking himself. This is all so new, so terrifying, so thrilling. He feels like he is breaking his shell. He suddenly cannot will words out of his throat.

So he just shakes his head and looks away.

“Can I kiss you again?” Dwalin asks. He swallows and smiles and blesses darkness for not showing how deeply unnerved he is.

They are talking in whispers.

“What?”

“Can I kiss you again?”

“ _Yes_.”

Dwalin covers the distance between them, grabs Thorin's hand, and Thorin's back is pressed against the wall, Dwalin's lips are meeting his halfway, and he hears Dwalin drop the plastic bag full of dog food, he feels his calloused palms grab hold of his face, one hand wraps around the nape of his neck.

Thorin loses himself in the sensation of Dwalin's lips searching for his, butterfly kisses and small bites and kissing, deeper, harder, and his fingers knot into his mohawk, his fingers slightly tug at it.

He does not know what is happening. All he knows is that he needs it, needs it like the breathless moment between fall and flight, needs it like the blood he wishes he could shed, needs it like the air he breathes.

 


	6. v

He is intoxicated, screaming, head spinning out of control so fast Dwalin's chest is a throbbing concoction of vines and thorns and weeds trapping the oxygen like a river's flow, all there is is the fact that he can bury his thoughts into Thorin's scent, knot his heartstrings with his fingers combing through Oakensheild's hair, run a thumb along Thorin's cheekbone, and Thorin is smiling Thorin is grabbing his hands his face wrapping his legs around Dwalin's hips as he straddles him, drinking from each other's lips like parched men with sand lodged between their teeth, Thorin so _aware_ as Dwalin's hand snakes behind his neck and draws him in, closer, as close as they can, Dwalin's tongue asking permission as it brushes between the other's lips, and Thorin parts them, and he's losing himself in the touch in the taste in the softness, all he can think about is Dwalin, right there, his hips tight between his thighs- it's all so new and unreal and unlike _anything_ he'd ever imagined, Dwalin's tongue in his mouth.

He pulls back for a moment, they're both panting.

(This is the first time Thorin's ever been so bold- before it was hands knotting together while they did homework, small smiles and butterfly kisses and loud, obnoxious, burning and embarrassing blushing).

Dwalin hikes Thorin's shirt up, enough to expose his back, and then there's open palms, rough and warm and eternal against Thorin's skin and Thorin gasps, deep, feels the sensation of air filling his lungs mingle with the fire churning across his limbs, such pretentious bombastic metaphors for the quiet quiet act of simply wanting someone else. Thorin bends his head back and leaves just enough room for Dwalin to press his lips to his neck, and his palms flow under Oakenshield's shirt, run along the small swatch of skin just above his jeans' waistline, the dip of the small of his back.

“ _Oh God_.”

Thorin moans and chokes it down with a breath and wraps his arms around Dwalin's neck and pulls him close to his chest, to his neck, to his lean, wanting body, to the heart that beats underneath as Dwalin's hands travel upwards, towards Heaven and the sweet taste of redemption and grace and need. He slightly brushes his fingertips against Thorin's nipples and Thorin feels the flames roar in his ears, like oceans exploding, suddenly he is aware of the fire all-consuming gnawing at his skin, trembling and hard as he fumbles for Dwalin and drags him into a kiss that serves only to muffle another ragged moan, brow furrowed in high-pitched painless agony as Dwalin flicks his nipples again and Thorin bucks, suddenly, mesmerized by his own recklessness, and tears a sound from Dwalin's smiling lips despite their clothes that makes him grin, a cross between a whimper and a sigh and a moan, _vulgar_ , such sweetly passionately vulgar sounds, they make Thorin's head spin with the taste of Christ's forbidden blood. He is washing himself in sin, completely, naked and stepping into boiling flames and opening his arms and welcoming it.

Up until the point when Dwalin shifts his weight and hoists him up and pushes him back-first onto the table, Maths notebooks and textbooks roughly shoved aside, the kiss growing hungrier and needier and rougher- and then Thorin's heart hits a rock that is guilt that is his father's unforgiving eyes that is shame, and he grabs Dwalin's wrists and stills them, pulls back from the kiss and stills himself.

The familiar nausea starts piling in his bloodstream and closing the mouth of his stomach, relentless, devastating and choking and cruel, the sinner walking in the pool feels the current drag him to the bottom, Christ's blood burns his tongue, pleasure turns to maggots, water ices his chest and freezes it and solidifies it until it is nothing but perfect immobility. Thorin is hyperaware of where he is and what he's doing and with _whom_ he's doing it- the disparaging quiet in the library broken only by the boys' labored breathing is so loud he feels his ears ring and buzz and it only makes the nausea worse, so much worse, sudden like a blow to the chest (it's always the chests that cave in first, heart-guardians, lions breaking their backs, dragons' flames sizzling and dying in smoke).

“I think we should-- I think we should stop.”

Thorin swallows white-hot liquid tarmac past the boulder in his throat and stares at Dwalin's shoulder, and the more he looks at the way that neck dips the more he feels his mind whizz and rumble like a broken engine. He is alone now- he got himself into this and he gave in to the poison and he is walking across a forest he does not have a map for, and there is no moss on the trees and the foliage is too thick to see the stars. There are lights at the end of this darkness, beckoning him: he does not know if he should hunt for them.

But the woods are lovely, dark and deep, they feel of old wood and new flowers and the slight tangy smell of nature still untouched, water singing when it rains.

Thorin is lost and it makes him want to cry because his mind is now and forever split in two and one half wants to follow the breadcrumbs back to the safety of home and another half wants to run towards the light, and neither are happy neither are satisfied, and Thorin just lets Dwalin's wrists go.

“Okay.”

Dwalin pulls back and Thorin pushes himself off the desk and fixes his shirt and picks up his homework, spreads the sheets that got crumpled, stares at his hands and this time around they are not pointing at the moon, they're not pointing at anything. The ice on his chest becomes liquid but does not loose its frostbite, trickles down into his stomach.

He wants to vomit, cleanse his innards completely- grey eyes search for his, though, a calloused hand cups his cheek, and the tears press into his throat,

“You all right?”

“I'm _fine_.”

A jewel-encrusted lie, prettied up by shining eyes and cracking voices, that tumbles out of his lips and is not believed, not even for even a moment. Thorin shakes his head and the guilty tears glisten- do not spill, just glisten and he suddenly trembles with the need to bury his nails into his throat and tear the skin off, dig through muscle until he can snap his vocal chords and hit a vein and bleed himself inside out and then he'd tear the throat apart and start to dig through his chest and force himself to spit out pieces of his own muscle and his teeth onto the floor and then claw his eyes out and force himself to eat them and tear his skull open and break his jaw clean off and all of these things put together will never be enough to repent him because he was _kissing_ a boy and he got _hard_ because of it and it cannot be right, he cannot be excused, the nausea grips, he knows instantly that every nail on every one of his fingers must be torn clean off.

So he buries his hands in Dwalin's and buries his face against his shoulder and MacFundin is taken aback, for a moment, freezes when he feels Thorin's fingers slip between his and squeeze, tight, Thorin shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath and swallows once, twice, three times.

“You _sure_ you're okay?”

“I'm a little- a little. Overwhelmed.”

“ _Thorin_. Thorin. _Hey_.”

Dwalin's pulling back and smiling at him and he slips a finger under Thorin's chin so that they can look each other in the eye. Thorin sniffles and smiles. Dwalin smiles back and ignores the small flutter in his chest that chuckles when he sees Thorin's smile.

“We don't have to do _anything_ you don't want to, at all. I don't want to force you. We can take this as slow as you want, as slow as you. As you need. All right?”

 _I'm scared_ Thorin had strangled out of himself two weeks before and Dwalin took note of the tone and the intonation and the unabashed honesty of a sixteen year old terrified boy dealing with his very first crush- the first one that doesn't seem like it's about to run head-first into a brick wall made of red guilt and crash, steam and flames escaping from under its hood. The first kiss of Thorin's life was a stolen one in a library he's been thinking about nonstop ever since it happened, but the boy he kissed is standing right in front of him, and is smiling that twisted, to-the-side smile of his (it always makes Dwalin look like as if he's one step ahead of everyone else, the only person alive who's managed to get the universe's big joke and is now laughing along with it) and he smiles and for the first time but not the last time, oh no, not the last time for a long, long while he builds up the courage to rest his forehead against MacFundin's.

“All right.”

He goes back to school in three days.

* * *

It is a quarter to midnight, and Thorin can't sleep.

This time, though, there isn't joy bubbling through his bloodstream: panic, heavy and chest-killing, has taken its place, and Thorin is oh so oh so oh so _very tired_.

He swallows and the guilt drills itself deeper inside, desperately wanting to survive and thus feeding on the oxygen his lungs feed his blood, there for having kissed Dwalin not once but twice and for having held his hand so many times and for that afternoon, especially, for having allowed Dwalin's hands under his shirt and having let his tongue in his mouth and having clearly wanted _more_ and having _liked_ it, because sinner boys are not allowed to enjoy things like these. And yet he wonders for a painful split second that it might not be all so bad- not when it makes him breathe as if he were taking deep gulps of mountain air and summer breeze, not when it makes him feel light and strong and as bright as a thousand suns, not when it makes him feel strangely alive, hands and arms and chest and face tingling, heartbeat hiccuping up to his nose.

 _You don't deserve it_ a voice snarls and it sounds so much like Father's he quickly bunches his knees up to his chest and curls his arms around his pillow and tells himself he's not imagining it's Dwalin, burying his face into the cloth and thinking of broad tattooed shoulders and stubble and grins that drive him mad.

Is this love? Is this what love is, this peculiar kind of madness, or is it just lust, taking hold of him with able, thin hands and squeezing until there's not a single drop of air left in his lungs?- he does not know. He was never taught the difference between love and lust because up to then it did not matter and this right now is certainly not helping him nor is it encouraging him to try and understand. All Thorin does right now is go with the flow.

Kiss Dwalin on the cheek? Do it, do it, who cares? Regret it later, when you're curled up in bed and you wish you could just will yourself out of existence.

Kiss him again. Do you love him? Does it matter? Do you just find him pretty, is the want you feel not even salvaged by love, is it just the basic human need to give in to mindless pleasure? _Does it matter_?

You want him he wants you, you're about to leave anyway, things will calm, things will stop shaking. He will find someone else to fill your evanescent and short-lasting ghost of a relationship that wasn't even a relationship to start with, it was given too little time and it blossomed in a garden with air saturated by guilt and fear and you will matter as much as scattered leaves.

Come Christmas, you will be nothing to each other.

(The lies we tell ourselves just to get through the day unscathed for the most part, and we wrongly predict the future because we have nothing else to hold onto).

But if it is lust and not love it is horribly persistent, like spiders burrowing into his grey matter searching for a new home and for a warm space to lay eggs, small and invasive, parasitical out of control.

Thorin buries his hands in his hair and tries to force the insects out of his thoughts.

The sound of gravel thrown against a windowpane does the trick, loosens the bindings, relieves his chest, kills the pests, but there are so many empty insects' bodies accumulating right under his skin, and they will calcify and infect, burn, sear, bleed until he is dry and hollow and jaded.

Thorin freezes and waits for the sound again.

It comes- for a moment he decides not to listen (he always listens).

Dwalin's standing under the rain and there isn't any umbrella.  
“Get dressed.”

“ _Excuse me_?”

“Get dressed. Come down. I want to take you somewhere.”

Thorin smiles at Dwalin, baffled.

“ _It's midnight_.”

“I don't care.”

Thorin glances behind his shoulder when a floorboard creaks, but his room is deadly quiet and the door is deadly still. He waits for the ceiling to crash but it doesn't. He turns back to Dwalin.

“Please come down?”

“ _What do you want_?”

“I want to say goodbye to you properly before you go. You'll be back by four AM,” he quickly adds, ” _No one will notice_.”

Thorin bites his lower lip.

“ _Please_?”

“If Father finds-”

“He won't. _I promise_.”

Dwalin is mistake after mistake, his biggest yet, the one he regrets both the least and the most.

He wears a flannel shirt and the first pair of jeans he can get his hands on.

They run under the storm up to Balin's small yellow car and they stuff themselves inside of it, dripping wet and chests panting and smiles waiting for their cue to take over their faces.

As Thorin runs, the elation grows with every step he takes.

This is madness, and let it be whatever it is.

 _This is madness_. And while he is treading through it, Thorin wants nothing else.

“Where are we going?”

“A friend of mine is throwing a party at the Centre at Wapping--"

"... _Wapping_?"

Dwalin decides to ignore Thorin's scandalised tone, "... and we can bring whoever we want so I thought I'd bring you.”

“Me?”

Dwalin shrugs in reply. “I like you, you like me. Why shouldn't I?”

Thorin smiles at him and realizes very fast how easily vocal chords can be silenced- he blushes and brushes wet hair out of his face, but not a single word manages to make it past his lips. He lowers his gaze as he smiles- Dwalin smiles himself when he sees this and cups Thorin's face and kisses him, quick and delicate, before igniting the car. Thorin leans back and watches the rain.

He pushes guilt aside, stares at nighttime as it follows them and blankets them and keeps them safe.

* * *

 There is music, and it matters, sure, it matters the same way the rain outside matters, or the fact that there're other people apart from them in the same room, the same way the floor matters because it is under their feet and the stairs matter because there's a flight of them behind them- which means that all that matters, _actually matters_ , is in front of Dwalin, is scrawny and has a badly-shaved teenage mustache, the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to his elbows and his hands are shyly holding his.

It is an oasis.

For once, Thorin's mind is perfectly quiet except for his heartbeat which is loud but a rapid pulse somewhat feels normal right now when everything in his world is madly spinning, mildly confusing, very pretty, with his grey-blue eyes and mohawk and five o'clock shadow and rough hands and stupid jeans vest and combat boots. He is a concoction ready to explode and he knows this, but the knot of fear has loosened a little, the knot of guilt is nearly gone.

Dwalin leans forward to kiss him.

Thorin pulls back.

( _Nearly gone_ ).

“It's okay,” Dwalin whispers, “We're safe here. _You're safe here_.”

The words are a six second prayer that awakens whatever deity of Hope hid deep within Thorin's core, and a small bird is born, a small blue egg cracks in his heart, there is a song he does not know the words to suddenly dancing on the tip of his tongue.

 _You're safe here_.

The bird is a phoenix, fire-hawk, burning wings that fill his chest with warmth he cannot describe.

Thorin smiles awkwardly and his shoulders tighten, but then he's taking a breath, and he leans forward, and when they kiss Dwalin's hands cup Thorin's face and he ignores with a smile pressed against Thorin's mouth his friends' hollering at him because the boy he is kissing is magic, gold, beauty that loves to run his hands through his mohawk. Hope Hope Hope in his eyes, Hope between his teeth, Hope on his tongue that always tastes of cigarettes and alcohol Thorin's never tasted either, but he lives vicariously through Dwalin's calloused palms, they spell Hope for redemption all of a sudden.

 _This might be love_.

God, he's so _scared_ , and the next thing Thorin feels is a bed under his back and he pushes himself up, props himself on his elbows as Dwalin slips his jacket off and doesn't lose time, leans over to kiss him again and holds onto both his shoulders, and with one hand Thorin's grabbing Dwalin as their tongues meet and the other his holding onto the cover and he's parting his lips and Dwalin dips his tongue in, and Thorin realizes what's exactly about to happen, his heart beating so fast so sudden he forgets how to think, while Dwalin undoes his shirt and then slips off his own, everything so similar to the afternoon, only that now it's so much more _real_.

This is too much. The fear drops down onto Thorin like ice-cold water dropping from a bucket, like divine punishment, divine rage, and he pulls himself out of the kiss out of Dwalin's hands out of his reach.

“No _._ ” he breathes, shaking his head, crawling backwards until his back hits a wall. “No. Not yet. Not. Not yet.”

Dwalin rests his hands on his bent knees (one leg on the bed one still off it, half standing) and smiles tenderly. He looks at the boy with wide blue eyes and an unbuttoned flannel shirt and feels nothing but affection. MacFundin puts his shirt on and nods.

“Okay.”

“I'm sorr-”

“No. No need to apologize.”

“But-”

“As I said, you set the pace. It's fine.”

Thorin licks his lips and carefully avoids Dwalin's gaze. The world around him rushes even faster.

“I'd like to go home now.”

“Okay.”

* * *

 

The car ride back is bone-quiet, hollow like a bird's chest, rattling like a witch's bones.

Thorin shuffles uncomfortably in the passenger seat and realizes he barely knows Dwalin at all, all he is is a handsome face and wild attitude, and as such Thorin cannot possibly be in love, even the idea sounds preposterous, love is for fools and children and people who don't know how the world works at all.

He is all three of those things.

It is half past one AM.

They're waiting for a light to turn green when Dwalin accidentally shatters their world forever and sets the burning car they are finally on track, although neither of them knows it yet. In the split second that follows, Dwalin molds both their lives and the things that are to come and damns them and saves them all at once, tears Thorin out of his depth for good and sends him walking amongst stars and nebulae and constellations.

Dwalin rests his hand on Thorin's.

The world comes to an end.

The ringing in Thorin's ears becomes the loudest it's ever been, a prayer that was not meant for words and never will be spills into his heart and feeds the bird that's sprouted there, his hands shake and he sweats and no matter the guilt, no matter the fear.

This feels right.

“Stop here,” he croaks once they're in view of the entrance. He won't last another second in this car, his entire body already feels as if it's made of seafoam.

“You'll get wet.”

“ _Stop here_.”

Dwalin complies. Thorin sits motionless for seconds that are minutes. There is an ocean roaring where his soul once was.

“Thank you,” he finally mutters.

In the moment it takes for Dwalin to answer with “You're welcome,” move his hand and turn his head to kiss Thorin goodbye and wish him good luck, Thorin's opened the car door, Thorin's slammed it shut, Thorin's hugged himself as he ran towards home under an unyielding storm.

Dwalin stares at the dashboard and wonders if what he's feeling is disappointment or something else- Thorin's taste still lingers in his short-term memory, the feeling of Thorin's skin is still whizzing through his brain along electrical impulses.

“Shit,” he murmurs to himself, and starts the car again.

Thorin starts crying. The loud sobs make his chest burn.


	7. vi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for ableism and psychological abuse !! stay safe kiddos

“Dwalin?” Balin calls from downstairs.

So here is the joke- right now, right here. It is a joke in three parts and part one is a kiss in a library, part two is a boy fumbling for a shirt, for the buttons that seal the shirt shut, and part three is the boy running out of a car, and there should be a punchline but it hasn't been invented yet, so you're just sitting here waiting for the end of the joke, and the end of the joke doesn't come, and there's only quiet and there is also (your mother's) a scream somewhere inside your brain and in a room far away from you, only that you can't place it, and right now you feel soft and exposed and naked, and it's summer, only it's not, only your father's broken a bottle and sliced your face open when he was a little too drunk and you were a little too bold.

Dwalin stares at the empty suitcase and blinks at the small room he's taken up in Balin's home and feels the stitches tug and pull, but not snap (they are always a moment from snapping, it seems, always so close to vomiting blood into his mouth and nose and teeth), he glances around at the room, at the window in the room and the door, and the white walls and the chest of drawers already full of his clothes and his hands and chest and face are tight and coiling around the stitches like wolves circling an intruder in their clearing, in their woods, and his brain feels frustrated and irritated like when you can't find the right pen but the words keep on raining into your fingertips and then your fingers are sick, cancerous, bloated with pus and fluid and rotting words and he can't do anything about it, he can't do anything but feel the stitches tug whenever he squints too hard or whenever he thinks too much and Dwalin's chest is always about to become thinner and thinner it seems, thin in a way that is blue eyes and a pretty scared smile and Dwalin angrily pushes rainy thoughts aside and songs that smell of burning flesh and bitter bones reduced to ash.

It's just a boy but that boy can't seem to let go of his throat.

And then he closes his eyes and there's the salty rough taste of blood and his mother's crying and there are a lot of things that currently hurt but at least Thorin hurts less and differently, he hasn't got sharp edges and doesn't smell of scotch and it somewhat tastes sweet and like smoke clutched stupidly in his fists, losing something he'd never even had is so strange and horrible and new (but the pain is, as always, richer and deeper and more burning, more intoxicating, than the pains that will come, this is nothing but a hot-headed, invigorating prelude- Thorin has wounds so deep they will push through Dwalin's chest and finally break the creaking ribs for good, and then he will wake up after having dreamt of blood soaked in his own sweat).

Dwalin sighs.

“Dwalin?” Balin calls again, this time opening Dwalin's bedroom door.

Dwalin turns towards his brother. Balin stares at him.

“You all right?”

“Sure.”

“You seem pensive.”

“No. No no. I'm fine.”

Balin tilts his head to the side and smiles very slightly. Dwalin stares at him, balanced between impassible and unnerved and suddenly feels painfully self-conscious of the scar that'll stick, that'll stay, that'll forever mark him.

“Do you mind helping me with the groceries or are you... busy?”

Dwalin violently feels his brother's eyes run down from his left temple and across the bridge of his nose and then focus on where the eye was miraculously spared and he immediately breaks eye contact.

“I can do it. I'll do it.”

Balin's face lights up with the smile of a man who is terrified of losing his little brother to the things that have been done to him and has just received the smallest glimmer of hope. Dwalin's head throbs with the oncoming storm.

“Great. And thank you, Dwals.”

Dwalin shrugs.

“Thank _you_ for taking me in.”

* * *

The delicate china clinks against the small plate and Frerin hates the sound to the core for the way it is paper-thin, sharp and a nauseating shade of blue. He stares at the polished wood of his father's desk and waits, with bated breath, for the moment he will be reprehended for not looking his father in the eye.

“Frerin.”

Frerin relishes in the remaining milliseconds of being able to not stare at eyes because eyes are so utterly _complicated_ and in the way and eyes don't work, not for him, never have and never will and the sound of the tea pot being set down suddenly magnifies and expands within his brain and he doesn't want to look nor feels the urge or need to but but _but_ -

“ _Frerin_.”

-he has to. He does.

His father's eyes are deep and unsettling and every single facet of blue and of fake and of glass is reflected in them, deep in an unnerving terrifying wrong way and he wants to whine wants to escape but he can't, knows he can't.

He breaks the eye contact.

His father sighs unbearably loud and leans back. The leather chair groans under his weight and Frerin is fully aware his hands are shaking. He snaps his fingers and lets the noise engulf him.

“Stop that.”

Automatically he squeezes his own fingers until they hurt to will them to stop- but there's a voice in his head and it's begging to be let out, it's begging like a wounded animal forced into a much too small cage.

“Sorry.”

“Look at me. Come on, I know you can.”

The kindness in his father's voice is a maggot squirming somewhere in his chest eating away at the delicate flesh, a promise of a lack of disappointment he knows is fake, is fake, is false.

_Why do people always lie_ .

“All I ask of you is for you to look me in the eye for a full minute.”

Frerin swallows and moves his gaze a little to his right, stares at his own teacup, and knows he won't be able to do it.

“Frerin.”

No. No. No, he can't do this, he cannot do this, the simple idea of having to do it is currently grabbing hold of his stomach and tearing it apart meticulously and he is building a house inside his mind and it is of solid rock and brittle earth and he is trying to build it as quickly as possible and he will hide in it, and he will hum so loud until it is unbreakable, and it will keep him safe, and he fights with every fibre of his being the urge to snap his fingers and curl up in a ball and oh God, oh _God_ -

Mother always knew what to do, Mother knew when to hold and when not to and Mother _understood_ , the same way Dis understands, and Father doesn't, and Frerin swallows. Thrain rests his palms upright against the wood.

“Frerin. Please.”

Kindness almost rough, almost degrading, kindness almost-

“ _Now_.”

almost gone. Completely gone. The voice is slightly louder slightly heavier slightly scarier, Frerin's heart mixes itself with his lungs and searches for somewhere to hide.

The bars of the cage cut into his fresh wounds and he hopes Thrain won't have to touch him to force him to look. But he will.

He always does.

Frerin shuts his eyes, and for a second he is safe.

* * *

He fidgets and sighs and stares, terrified, at the phone in front of him.

Somewhere his heart is screaming at him and begging at him to stop, but he's there, it's too late, and he has a number he committed to memory the morning he had left home for school that has been stirring inside his brain for the past two months and a half.

Thorin knows his hands are clammy even before he picks up the headset.

He stares at the dial, wonders what on Earth he's about to do, feels instantly exhausted, puts the headset down, picks it up again, actually places it close to his ear. The monotone beep bounces off against his eardrum and he tries to will his fingers to move- but he needs this. But he wants this.

He has become an addict without even noticing it, the want and ache and need are a constant in his every movement and shamelessly weigh down his thoughts with uneasy breaths and fingers dancing where they shouldn't. He wills himself to hope nobody's home, that no one will pick up, that he'll be saved from himself and this will be the final breaking point where he will realize how mad he's acting and trick himself into just letting it all go (but even the simplest lies these days are the hardest to swallow) but then his brother picks up and Thorin's breathing lets out one last wheeze before dying and rotting through his body. He freezes. He waits until they hang up on the other line and then reanimates his breathing long enough for it to slip into a quiet, tentative, calm coma.

He waits, and he waits, and he waits, and the sea foam starts to build up from his toes up his knees through his legs up his belly, fills his torso with seaweed and water and the deepest of greenish blues, and then reaches his neck and his face and his eyes, and Thorin is light, all of a sudden, heartbeat matching the weight he feels his body has just become: he is nothing but a hummingbird. He dials again.

“Hello?”

This time the voice is younger and he recognizes it immediately and he nearly vomits all of the saltwater all over his hands out of fear.

“Hello?”

He basks in the depth and the sandpaper vowels and the roughness and he wishes it were whispering his name, but it isn't, so he just listens to the other's puzzled breathing and yells at himself about having to actually _answer_ , having to _say something_ \- he knows he can't.

“... _Hello_?”

Dwalin's voice, Thorin has realized much too late, renders him incapable even of thinking.

He shuts his eyes and drinks in Dwalin's little quizzical sigh before the soft _click_ comes and the toneless bleeping returns to his ears, and while Dwalin comments to his brother about the weirdness of that particular, quiet call, Thorin suddenly knows he will never, ever ever be able to move again. So he sinks to the floor, very small, very quiet, very not-here, as the ocean inside him rumbles and roars and he tries to fight back the sensation of drowning by bunching his knees up tight to his chest, and pressing his forehead into them, and not moving.

He feels like a fool.

His breathing gives no signs of life.

* * *

She quietly opens the door and finds Frerin huddled on the bed, curled up, breathing even.

“Can I stay?” Dis asks.

“Yes.”

They are _children_ , the same age Thorin was when their mother died, and they are already walking on glass so thin they can hear it creaking under their already too heavy weight.

She doesn't come near, though. She lets him listen to her sniffling, and her breathing, and the sounds she makes when she walks up to the bookshelf to grab a mystery novel and the small noises she makes as she reads, because in his mind they paint mint and rose-tinted pictures that calm him. Frerin stares at the wall and is so, so, _so_ grateful the wall has no eyes to stare back.

“I miss Mum.” he whispers suddenly.

They are children.

“I do too, Frer.”

And the ice has already started to sink into water.

 


	8. vii

The phone calls become an intoxication- not properly addictive but neither can he survive without them, a maddening mix of “I'll speak a bloody fucking word this time” and simple, exhausted quietness.

He wonders if Dwalin has grown tired of these wordless calls that start nowhere, go nowhere and end nowhere except into the fractured ravines and crevices of his own breathing guilt, but at least in his eyes and mind it hurts less than masturbating, the guilt is much less stained and easier to bear, he doesn't feel like a whore or a criminal or the lowest of lowly scum.

Or all three at once, for that matter.

The end of September and October, November and the beginning of December are a single cry of unprepared, unstable anguish that extends in his brain as far as Dwalin's heart is and back, a rattling metal railway of absolute confusion the desperate train of his entire existence is about to derail off of into an explosion of fire and brimstone and guiltless sin- my God, he is so _tired_ of such complicated metaphors, but there is no other way he can think of to describe the longing that day by day ravages through his chest and into his lungs, hollowing him out like termites hollow wood. Insect metaphors seem to be his favourite, these days- first the spiders, now the termites, both breeding and laying eggs and hatching them in the warmth of his heart infested by guilt in the shape of unstoppable bloating and rupturing over and over and over again like Prometheus' liver, only that there isn't any eagle to eat the cancer away and he is no saviour of man arisen from the depths of darkness, fingers peeling and curling and bubbling as he clenched the sacred spark: he is just a very sad, very lonely rich boy, kicking rocks down the gravel path that leads from his dormitory to the library, trying to swallow down the lump of hate between his eyes that is dangerously becoming a migraine, ignoring the winter drizzle as it seeps into his clothes.

He sits in the library so quietly he wonders if being silent is enough to make oneself disappear (he _wishes_ not wonders) and while in front of him silence extends like a grey fog, engulfing everything in its way (giggles and sobs and coughing and hiccups and sniffles and tears and smiles and laughs and promises and loved ones and letters and numbers and music and dreams and nightmares and sleepless nights and crowded days and eternities and moments and the way leaves dance when you watch them in the right light and boys with grey eyes who fall in love with boys with blue eyes and boys with blue eyes who hope boys with grey eyes will save them), behind him love roars like a victorious lioness, queen of her pride, and it is red and orange and fire and beauty and the deepest of velveteen blacks.

He stands in the middle, between waterfall and freshwater spring.

Thorin balances a pencil on the back of his hand and watches it as it rolls off of it and onto the desk and doesn't stop there and he does nothing to still it as it falls inevitably towards its demise: a perfectly polished wooden floor against which it makes the faintest of noises as it bounces, and the tip breaks. Oakenshield leans over to pick it up and the movement is swift and breathless, and he grabs it, and then he stares at the broken tip, jagged graphite that writes double when he presses it to the paper.

A straight line, split in two, lonely amongst the pale blue lines of his ruled notebook. He stares at it, goes over it, now the line is quadruple and he writes a semicircle next to it and then a plus, and a T, and an equal, and a small, crude heart.

D + T = ♥

There is a particular kind of sadness that sticks to the inside of your throat in a painful, scorching obnoxious way that no amount of tears or screams will ever rid you of, no crying, no begging, no pounding your fists against a wall, no howling into a pillow, nothing at all.

Thorin stares at what he's just written on the otherwise perfectly unmarked piece of paper.

It is, at best, cheesy.

It is, at best, pathetic.

And it is, for some reason, the funniest thing he's ever seen in his life.

(Did we forget to say? This type of sadness is best relieved through laughter, of the completely pointless and hysterical kind).

Being silent might make you disappear, but Thorin has just realized that laughing will give you wings, they will split through the skin and through the sinew and bone of your shoulder blades, ragged, still bleeding, white tinged pink with the throbbing of newborn feathers- very, very similar to the wings that true love's kiss (a fairytale incarnate) are able to give you. In the quiet of a university library a miraculous hybrid of human and animal is starting to stifle a giggle with his fist and when he cannot hold the glistening stream of laughter in any longer he buries his head in his arms, fits shaking his frame in a way that is so utterly similar to sobs it is somewhat astounding.

The laughing is both hysterical and a key to opening his tightly fear-bandaged torso, breaking the last layers of skin keeping his wings in, freeing the soul and it staggers lurches forward searches for something to cling onto.

“Keep it _down_ , Oakenshield!” someone hisses from a table next to his. He quickly pulls his head up and sheepishly grins at them, “Right. Sorry.”

“What's so bloody funny anyway?”

Thorin touches his cheek and feels it wet.

He is in love with a boy and he kissed that boy and he wants to kiss that boy again and again and again- a ludicrous thought in its own right, but he loves deeper and deeper every day and he doesn't even know if the boy he loves even remembers his name and yet he _loves_ and no amount of sand can smother such a roaring fire: there is no ice that needs thawing in his heart, no matter how hard he's tried to kill the songbird still nests there, no endless winter, no sunless days- he is in love, and he cannot do anything about it.

It scares him so much the only thing he can fathom doing right now is laughing.

Thorin shrugs,

“I dunno. Life, I, I guess. Something like that.”

and the smile just won't leave his lips.

He realizes he's probably starting to look like an idiot, and if this were a normal laugh and a normal day and a normal life, he'd be blushing right now, but it's none of those things, and here he is smiling like a loon, and then he just shrugs, the other boy rolls his eye, and they both go back to their notebooks. There's a small secret written into Thorin's though, now, a small thing that's just his, and he finds himself treasuring it, he finds himself knowing that keeping it safe will keep him alive.

* * *
    
    
      **DECEMBER 24 th, 1982 **
    

Dwalin frowns at the mirror and then scowls at his brother when he walks by the bathroom.

“I still don't understand _why_ you insist on having me come to these dinners. He doesn't like me, I don't like him and neither of us enjoy it.”

Balin tuts and retraces his steps, poking his head into the bathroom. Dwalin looks at his reflection in the mirror and frowns.

“Because it's _good_ for you.”

“Good for me?”

“Gets you out of the house. Makes you do things.”

“I already _do_ things.”

Balin raises both eyebrows at him, “Beating up neo-nazis isn't _doing things_ , Dwalin.”

“It was _one time_.”

“ _Three_.”

“It counts as community service. I get rid of pests.”

His brother sighs and stares at him. Dwalin stares back.

“ _What_?”

“Finish getting ready, we're already late,” Balin knocks against the doorframe, “and Thorin'll be there!” he calls as he walks down the stairs.

Dwalin's heart uncomfortably sinks its talons into the walls of his chest cavity and starts clambering its way up into his mouth via his throat.

“ _What_? You're joking, _right_?” he calls down, running out of the bathroom and leaning agains the stair's banister.

But Balin doesn't answer, although he's heard him loud and clear.

* * *

 

Thorin laughs as his little sister zooms past him, trailing a Christmas tree decoration behind her like a ribbon and sporting another one wrapped around her neck. Frerin races behind, laughing too.

Thorin may or may not be slightly tipsy, but it makes it easier, makes everything easier (addiction is a nifty little crack to rest your weary head in), makes him feel like he's found his wings again (they were torn from his shoulders a few days after they'd bloomed, leaving him wailing on the floor in the dirt his mouth full of customary sacrificial blood) and he spins around and his eyes meet his father's. Thrain raises his glass to him ever so slightly and smiles, and Thorin does the same and wants to set himself on fire.

His father's attention is luckily taken away from him, sticky and bloodied with knuckles with scabs still drying, and directed towards an elegant, somber man and a twenty-something boy with the same intensity in his eyes and jaw standing next to him, Arador Argonui Ratna Pradhan and his son, Arathorn Arador Ratna Pradhan, as revoltingly rich as they are, as revoltingly hypocritical.

His father's smile is a sickly sweet grin dipped in fat and set on fire.

Thorin pours himself another glass of wine and allows his gaze to wander around and along and between the number of people whose name he doesn't remember for the life of him, lords and ladies and sirs and businessmen and women and duchesses and dukes there just to show that they can be there, and the alcohol in an empty stomach is making him slightly nauseous. His mouth tastes bitter and his head churns with grey mist and vomited water.

He shuts his eyes and when he opens them again, the MacFundin brothers have just walked in. Thorin swallows and the drink is pins and needles past his Adam's apple and he puts his glass down.

His hands are shaking.

He begs to a God that stopped believing in him long ago for mercy he knows for certain he will not allow to come and forgiveness he knows he is unable to obtain, his wings are torn apart for good, banished from Heaven by love and lust and his cheeks are ablaze, a midnight forest fire, his eyes are a pool never quieting down, ever-churning. Dwalin's eyes meet his for a split second and Dwalin is standing on the brink of a precipice and Thorin is standing on the ravine across it and suddenly they both know that to reach each other they will have to throw themselves to the rocks and the shadows below, leave their carcasses for lionesses to feast upon, their blood nectar and ambrosia and warpaint. Thorin swallows and heads for the bathroom.

It takes ice water to cool his charred face, to turn the burned flesh into something human again, to revive him, make the identification easy. He is a house burning to the ground and his knees are the foundations tumbling.

The door behind him opens and closes.

“You okay?”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Thorin says out loud without wanting to and he turns around, and Dwalin is staring at him. He looks worried, and Thorin runs a hand through his hair, which he's cut, and he's not used to his neck being bare.

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Alcohol got to my stomach.”

“D'you need to puke?”

“No.”

He furrows his brow and stares at the wall and hopes to will Dwalin to disappear. He's grown a beard.

It makes him look even prettier.

And then he notices the scar, a tear in the fabric of MacFundin's face. Thorin stares despite not wanting to, Dwalin looks down when he does.

“You've grown a. You've grown a beard.”

It's in these moments that Thorin hopes no one will walk in, because he knows how this will end, he knew it was going to end in disaster the moment he tried to lock himself in the bathroom and forgot to shut the door properly.

“Yeah.”

Dwalin's never felt his heart beat so hard so quick so stupidly. God, he should be angry, and maybe he is, a little, for the way Thorin ran out of his car months earlier, throat echoing with sobs, for the way he left him there in the water and the filth and the dust, but so much more of him is happy. So much more of him is singing.

“It looks good on you.”

Balin eyes the crowd and for a second realizes both his brother and Thorin have gone missing- Thrain's not noticed yet, no one has, but there's a door that's shut and it wasn't before and two teenage boys missing and Dwalin screaming “ _What_?” down the stairs squarely placed in the center of his brain, and so he very subtly moves to stand in front of the door, smiles and nods at whoever smiles and nods at him.

“Thank you,” Dwalin mutters and smiles and doesn't know what else to add. “You cut your hair,” he ends up saying.

Love makes people blind and stupid and virtually unable to handle a proper conversation.

The kiss Thorin substitutes to the words he might awkwardly utter is louder than any triumphant speech, though, his lips crashing with Dwalin's as his hands knot with his mohawk and run through his stubble and he breathes, for a second, “I _missed you_ ,” and suddenly Thorin's wings are back, Dwalin's entire being is a being of song and light.

Thorin might have fallen from Heaven, but he has just stepped into Grace. 


	9. viii

He thinks he's lost his mind in this absurd way that makes it so that no matter how hard he tries to will himself to _stop_ kissing Dwalin, he cannot (it is the same absurd need that took over him the first time they shared a kiss and all the times after that and the _phone calls_ , those ridiculous, those stupid stupid phone calls of his, he feels like he's falling again, always always falling. His face tingles with what he knows is a blush, his hands go numb, his breathing is quicker, is shallower, is sweeter against Dwalin's lips who's decided for now to stop thinking altogether, no questions asked, no answers needed- at least until the kiss doesn't end. At least until then, because he guesses this is what he wants infinity to look like, taste like, breathe like: Thorin's fingers digging into his mohawk and his taste filling his heartbeat, allowing his hands to run across Oakenshield's ribs, the shirt and jacket are a layer too much and Dwalin realizes he _wants him_ , even though he still feels hurt, but he wants him so much he's pushing him up against the swatch of wall between two sinks and he's kissing him as deeply as he can.

Oxygen is unimportant right now- but something else is.

Dwalin comes up for air- willingly, unwillingly, it's not up to him to decide. His body tells him he needs to breathe and he complies. Thorin whines very quietly, almost purring, the sound nearly trapped in his throat never to be let out: disappointment and want, and Oakenshield licks his swollen lips and leans forward.

Dwalin pulls back.

Thorin stares at him, then, and Dwalin's heart cracks a little (but not too much) when he sees the utter disappointment and worry that paint themselves in bristled strokes on his face as he furrows his brow. The small rift breaches into whatever anger and bitterness over that past summer could be left and he just awkwardly places a finger to Thorin's lips.

Thorin scrunches his nose up in surprise and then smiles, and Dwalin has to resist the urge to kiss him all over again.

He turns around and quickly covers the distance between them and the door- and he turns the key in the lock, a soft click, and suddenly Thorin is blushing again, deeper now.

“Sorry I didn't- I didn't think about...”

“It's all fine. All perfectly fine,” Dwalin surprises himself nearly growling, as he grabs Thorin's wrist, feels his pulse a quick mangled mess thudding its way across his veins and kisses him deep and hard and sweet, Thorin's back is up against the wall again.

He thinks he could die tonight.

He thinks he could die a million nights in a row, and he would still be happy.

* * *

Thorin cannot sleep, which does not come as a surprise, not at all: insomnia crept up onto him sometime between eleven PM and half past midnight, when he was staring at the wall with his skin crawling and his heart hammering a home for itself in his chest.

He wishes he could sleep. He wishes he could tear himself back home from the migraine and the confusion and the sensation of a rock continuously being slammed into his head but instead he's sternly staring at the wall and the wallpaper pattern, refusing to turn to see what time it is, trying to force himself to breathe.

It doesn't work. It never works.

It didn't work when he was six, it didn't work when he was ten, it didn't work when he was eleven, and it's not working now. It _certainly_ isn't working now.

He wraps himself in his blankets tighter, presses his chin to his chest and squeezes his eyes shut, wishing he could find a balance between the cold in his bones and the warmth in his room: the fireplace is tracing reddish shadows along the contours of the objects there, including him, they feel immersed in a dream, something unreal and indefinable and somewhat empty. He wants to yell, like the scream is matter hollowed out directly from his chest cavity deposited into his vocal chords, vibrating, waiting to hatch the minute he decides to bury his face into his pillow. He wants to throw himself against a wall.

He wants Dwalin and thinking about Dwalin reinforces that thought ten-fold, and all of a sudden he feels immensely tired, so tired he knows he'll never be able to sleep now, so tired he wants to walk out of his room void of any thought or emotion, like a robot, and stand at the top of the stairs and stare at them and think very, very hard about throwing himself down them.

(Maybe his back will break or maybe just his neck, or maybe both, and then he'll be dead and his brain will be quiet).

He gets distracted from this thought by the delicate pitter-patter of gravel thrown against a window. His heart surges, spreads wings, nearly makes him vomit as it beats and beats and grows with every throb, until the scream he hollowed out of his bones is filled with nothing but blood.

He stands up and hopes the floorboards creak so loud he does not have to breathe, and opens the window.

“Do you _ever_ sleep?”

“Couldn't.”

Dwalin smiles up and Thorin can see the corners of his mouth curling in the garden light, the shadows as they dance under his hood, pulled up to protect him from the cold. The scar has changed the mapping of his face, turned planes into mountain ranges and cheekbones into secret crevices to hide in. It makes his hands sweat and his heart stand still, waiting.

“Why not?”

Dwalin shrugs, “I was thinking.”

“It's nearly dawn.”

“I know.”

“I can't come, you know. People'll be up soon.”

“But I can't stop thinking about you.”

Honesty, blunt and heavy, spat out with little to no remorse. That's what Dwalin is: barreling through walls with the force his words will give him, tearing them down with his eyes and his teeth and his tongue. He's tripping now, though, an entirely uncomfortable feeling: his stomach tends to float these days, his thoughts follow suit, he can't stop feeling Thorin's breath against his every time he blinks, and he has tried and tried and tried to will his body to stop.

But he can't.

Try as he might, he simply cannot.

Thorin blushes and wishes his hair were still there so it could cover his face, but the curtain's been chopped and he's been left on display, and he giggles to himself.

Maybe a bit too loud.

“What's so funny?”

“I... nothing. _Nothing_.”

Dwalin tilts his head to the side, and a strand of hair escapes his hood and he brushes it behind his ear, “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

_I have our initials and a heart written in one of my notebooks. Everything's ridiculous._ _My entire life's become ridiculous_.

“You're beautiful,” he nearly allows himself to say out loud, because his heart has not yet started beating again, but he traps himself long enough to not let the words come out despite the fact that the movement Dwalin did, the flick of his fingers as he pushed the strand of hair behind his ear makes the oxygen in his blood battle its way through his body ferocious, and it makes breathing difficult, over and over and over again.

Falling in love is a ritual of complicated repeated mannerisms.

“Just... _Jesus Christ_. Just meet me 'round the back.”

He doesn't see it, because he's already turning, but Dwalin smiles.

He is very, very careful when he closes his bedroom door behind him, holding his shoes as to not make too much noise (Charlotte _ruff_ s at him quizzically when he crosses the main living room and then turns to sleep on her stomach) and he stops every single time a floorboard creaks- now, they're too loud, the decibels are useful only when they suit his needs. In his mind, scenarios of pure disaster paint themselves in vivid, horrifying colors- he doesn't know how to react to them so he simply pushes them aside, and ignores what his father would do to him if his father found out), but the guests are gone, have been gone for hours.

It's been steadily snowing ever since three AM.

He gingerly opens the backdoor in the pantry and frowns at the cold that slips in. Thorin's toes curl in his socks when he accidentally steps into a wet muddle of snow and dirt and water, and he curses between his teeth. A small chuckle comes from his right. Dwalin's leaning with his shoulder against the brick wall, covering himself as best as he can from the falling snow, arms crossed, hood still on.

“Are you planning on _wearing those_ or are they just for show?”

He might have cut it, but Thorin still bows his head when he laughs embarrassedly, as if the hair could still cover his face. The cold and the blush make his cheeks go red, and it contrasts with the fullness of his eyes. Dwalin surprises himself avoiding that gaze, staring at the tip of his shoes: his greys are unworthy of meshing with those blues, and all of a sudden he is aware he will never consider them or himself worthy of them, ever again.

Some things are much too beautiful not to place on a pedestal, some things burn too bright not to worship.

Thorin clumsily hops on one foot as he's tying his left shoe, trying not to soak his socks even more. Dwalin chuckles behind his hand and Thorin glares at him, playfully, a gesture so natural his heart hammers hard and fast, his palms are sweaty again, he is an actor in a play reciting word for word a script that was written when a madman danced in between the strands of his subconscious, picking and choosing at his own discretion.

“Don't laugh, someone might hear.”

His scarf trails on the ground and he quickly snatches it up and wraps it around his face.

“Let's go,” Dwalin whispers. He outstretches his hand. Thorin stares at it for a second, baffled, then glances behind his shoulder at the closed door, and then at the empty courtyard, at the snow, at the darkness still thick, at Balin's tiny yellow car parked right outside the gate, engine turned off.

“Did you––?”

“Did I what?”

“Climb over the fence?”

Dwalin's eyebrow arches and his face twists in a halfway smirk, even proud, and he mockingly puffs out his chest, “Wasn't _that_ hard.”

“You're an idiot.”

“ _Excuse me_?”

“You could've fallen. Hurt yourself. Broken a bone. How would've I explained something like _that_ to Father?”

“Oh my _God_.”

Dwalin laughs a single bark and drops his hand and Thorin stares at it longingly but burrows his in his pockets. He's not brave. Standing outside in the cold talking to MacFundin and smiling and kissing him is the bravest he hopes to ever be, so he's not going to grab Dwalin's hand, although he wants to.

He really, really wants to.

“Where are we going?” he asks, as Dwalin hauls himself over the metal railing. The snow muffles the thud of his feet hitting the ground: for a moment they stare at each other through the metal bars, a makeshift Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers separated by a fence.

“It's a secret.”

Thorin rolls his eyes.

“No, I'm serious. C'mon. You said it yourself, people'll be up soon. Come on.”

Thorin grabs the cold bars and regrets not having brought a pair of gloves. He shuffles his feet and glances up at the gate, squares Dwalin from head to toe and then turns back towards his home.

“...Where are you going?”

“Just gimme a moment.”

He returns after a few seconds of rummaging behind the pantry door with a bunch of keys. Dwalin stares at him as Thorin quickly unlocks the gate, opens it, runs back inside to put the keys where they were and frowns when the gate creaks much too loudly shut.

He turns to look at Dwalin, who's smiling in utter, absolute delight.

“What is it?”

“You're _absurd_.”

“Said the boy who's just climbed over a gate. Now quickly, I nearly risked running into Pamela.”

“Pamela?”

“The maid. Housekeeper. Keeps. The house. Somewhat in order, I guess. Although I don't think there's not much point.”

Thorin gratefully presses his hands to the car's spluttering radiator in the hopes of warming them. He wrings them, just in case, and blows onto them for good measure.

“Not much point?”

“Dad–– _Father_ 's always in his study, anyway, and no one's allowed in there. I'm hardly ever at home and Dee is just... _naturally_ tidy. The only messy one is Frer, but he's learning.”

Dwalin snorts, “Shouldn't twelve year olds just _be_ messy?”

“Most twelve year olds don't have Thrain Oakenshield as a father.”

Another snort, “If _your dad_ 's bad, you should see mine.”

Thorin falls very, very quiet. Dwalin glances over at him and sees that he's staring at his hands which he's moved in his lap and he's brought his knees tight together. Lips thin, gaze somewhat lost, he twists his mouth to the side in a grimace.

“I'm sorry.”

“Are you sure the car can handle the snow?”

Dwalin blinks at Thorin, completely at loss by the sudden change of subject. It takes him a moment to realize that this is Thorin's way of saying that no harm's been done, that everything's okay. He has to learn him, Dwalin knows all of a sudden. This isn't a one night stand or a stupid summer fling, despite what he's been thinking or hoping (didn't he want this, though? Didn't he lie awake for hours staring at the ceiling with his brain churning? Didn't he spend months telling himself he wasn't actually pining, that he was being stupid, that everything was stupid?), he needs to learn Thorin and what he is, how he acts, the entire world he trails behind him.

“This one? Baby's faced more than a few snowstorms. I'm pretty certain we're safe.”

Thorin suspiciously eyes the dashboard and then presses his hands to the radiator again. It's not exactly working but it's not completely freezing, either, and he decides to count his blessings and dwell on the positive things instead of concentrating on the fact that he currently cannot feel his fingers. Dwalin fiddles with the radio and gives up on it pretty soon, when there's nothing but static for fifteen channels and he grumbles about the car being a “proper fucking pile of shit”.

“I thought the car was... wonderful?”

“Well, _it has its flaws_.”

Thorin snorts and smiles at Dwalin as Dwalin backs up in a road he doesn't recognize and makes a U turn he's pretty sure is illegal, before turning right. An early bird cyclist braving the horrible weather flips him the finger and MacFundin flips it right back.

“Where are we going again?”

“It's a surprise.”

“I don't like surprises.”

Dwalin glances over at him as he pulls into a seemingly empty lot. Thorin furrows his brow at the sign and then turns towards Dwalin.

“Parliament Hill.” he breathes and smiles. “I haven't been here in years. Mum used to bring me.”

_Father_ , _Mum_ Dwalin notices, a speech quirk simple and, as always, complicated. He thinks he's understanding now that there is so much more under the surface (he just doesn't know _how much_ ) and some of it if not all of it is sludge, and poison, and eating Thorin alive. _Sixteen_ , he reminds himself again. _And you're eighteen_. It unnerves him- sometimes he wishes he wasn't so young and helpless ( _helpless_? Not at all, you broke that bastard's nose last ni- oh. Oh, _shush_ , _you know what I mean_ ).

“Take my hand?” he asks to quiet the sudden explosion. Snow crunches under his feet. He smiles. Thorin stares at his outstretched hand and grabs it because it is the only thing the river-flow will let him do: he welcomes the tide as it rushes, welcomes it as it sweeps him to sea. Dwalin's tugging at him now, drawing him close as he walks backwards up the slope, never tearing his eyes off of him.

Thorin's heartbeat is eternal. He leans forward under cover of darkness and their lips meet, their breaths warm, snow bejeweling Thorin's eyelashes with white and crystal and clear, hands meeting against skin. Dwalin's hands warm his thin thin bones, Thorin leans his forehead against his.

He's laughing and he doesn't know it, shifting his weight making Dwalin fall.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, smile still parting his lips, and Dwalin pulls him on top of himself, kisses him. He doesn't care about his soaking wet freezing hoodie, because there is the weight of Thorin on his hips that covers everything else and renders it irrelevant, he runs his palms along Oakenshield's ribcage and Thorin's kissing him again, he's laughing.

He wants him right now not because he is beautiful but because the moment they're both breathing (sharp and crystal clear as only ice and snow can be, love muddling the contours though, joy shattering the perfect fractals) is beautiful. He can't see Thorin's eyes right now because they're closed but he doesn't care.

Love is a series of repeating leitmotifs and he is hearing them all for the first time.

“ _Oh_.”

Thorin pulls himself up so his bust is upright. The sun rises- pale, sickly, unable to fight back the snow- but it still manages to play its magic.

London below them is set ablaze with blue and silver flame, holy, holy, Christ is coming, a martyr born- “Oh,” Thorin whispers again, and he rolls off of Dwalin and stands. He wraps his arms around himself, turns to stone, turns very still. Breathes: his breath is a cloud he follows with his gaze as it dissipates in first dawn light and he shivers, and then there's hands circling around his hips, drawing him close, Dwalin's chin resting on his shoulder. Thorin buries his nose against Dwalin's neck, opens his eyes. MacFundin lies to himself and tells himself that the light is reflected in the snow on the rooftops but most specially, most importantly, in the boy he's holding's blue eyes. He never thought he'd fall in love with a pair of eyes.

He never thought he'd be able to want so differently than how he usually wants- usually, want tightens his stomach, coils at the bottom, tense and hard. This want expands in his ribcage, breaks the bones to breathe easier, fills him with air and light and skin burning as if he were being scorched by Holy fire. Angels have blue eyes, he decides then and there.

(Angels have blue eyes and have their wings torn from them, and it scars it stays it haunts).

Thorin kisses his neck and electricity jolts where the words go, “Merry Christmas,” Oakenshield whispers.

Thorin wonders if this all counts as a prayer to the Lord, wonders if this all can be forgotten, amended, if this all counts as an act of worship, because he knows right now his blood is Holy when it flows through flesh that's being held by Dwalin's hands, he knows his breath is Holy, his eyes his mouth his teeth are Holy.

His soul is Holy, just for a moment.

“Amen,” he wants to say, _so be it_ to whatever prayer has been uttering relentlessly in his brain ever since the sun rose, but the words change in the air.

“I love you,” they become, and he will think about them later, he will think about their true meaning later, for right now they are the loudest prayer of them all and leave no room for thought, just room for breath.

 


	10. ix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas to all you lovelies!! warning for this chapter being nsfw  
> other than that, enjoy your holidays. and to anyone whose family sucks, i am your dad now. no excuses

The first snowball hits Thorin on the back of the head and he stops in his tracks, turns around very slowly, sees his little brother standing with his arms crossed and his glasses sitting on the tip of his reddened, cold nose.

Frerin sniffles, Thorin eyes his brother and arches an eyebrow.

They stare at each other.

The second snowball hits Thorin on the cheek.

He turns around and sees Dis standing to his right with a large grin and her arms crossed over her chest.

Thorin turns back towards his brother and points a finger at Frerin:

“This is treason.”

Frerin's snowball hits him in the chest.

“This is _high_ trea-”

Three snowballs hit Thorin in the face in rapid succession.

Thorin stumbles back. He ducks a fourth one and then starts to run as fast as he can towards the house.

Dwalin frowns at the water pipe he's been substituting to the one that burst, and then he hears Thorin's scream when Dis pours snow down his collar. When he turns his head he sees Thorin scramble to pick up snow and quickly mash it into an effective weapon.

He blindly throws the snowball at Frerin and misses him entirely.

Dwalin stares from the top of his ladder at the scene and stops to think for a moment.

There are two things he could do: do nothing, fix his pipe and go back into the house and maybe scrounge some form of hot beverage _or_ he could climb down, arm himself and take action.

Thorin makes a mad dash for the door, only to find his way blocked by Dwalin's towering form.

“Oh _thank God_ , they've been--”

Thorin's words fall short when a snowball narrowly misses his head. The look of pure bewilderment, betrayal and horror Thorin gives Dwalin is long enough for both Frerin and Dis to collide with their older brother and throw him face-first into the snow.

“ _You_!” Thorin screams, pointing an accusatory finger as he tries to wrestle Frerin off of himself.

Dwalin laughs.

“You _bastard_!” Thorin yells, “You _traitorous bastard_!”

Thorin wriggles out of his siblings' grasp, Dis in a fit of tearful, merry giggles and as he attempts to stand up he feels his foot connect with compact, slippery snow. He curses and falls again, his scarf getting trampled.

Dis is lying on the ground holding her stomach.

“You _jerks_!” Thorin yells as Frerin's laughter joins in too. Dwalin's standing with his hands buried in his pockets and a sheepish grin on his face. Thorin's coat now soaked, the eldest Oakenshield sibling stands up, his face frozen in an angry scowl as he tries to untangle his scarf from the mess of his feet and the slush. Frerin wipes his eyes from the tears with the back of his hand, “Oh my _God_ ,” he mumbles, and squares Thorin from head to toe.

“You look like a mess.”

“Oh, _do I now_?” Thorin snaps at him. He clenches his jaw, turns on his heels, balls his fists, marches back towards the house. Dis throws one last snowball that misses him and Thorin suddenly, briskly turns around.

“ _Leave me alone_.” he yells, having to grasp at every straw of his own will not to curse in front of the kids.

“Thorin, you're not _cross_ , are you?” Dwalin calls after him. Thorin doesn't answer. He's cold, and wet, and humiliated, and didn't feel like falling in front of Dwalin, and Dwalin laughing at him had stung, but most importantly he is _freezing_ , and all he wanted to do was get from point A (the garden, where he'd been watching the white and the quiet of freshly fallen snow) to point B (the house) but then he'd been sidetracked, and he wasn't in the mood for sidetracking, wasn't in the mood to get wet, wasn't in the mood for his idiotic siblings and their idiotic, _childish_ , games, for their--

“ _Thorin_!”

He ignores Dwalin, hears him distinctly bark “Oh, _Jesus Christ_!” and slams the screen door behind himself. He takes off his boots, takes off his scarf, takes off his coat and his soaking socks and his shirt. He grabs a sweater from off the stairway banister and sets up some water to boil.

The kitchen door is pushed open behind him, he turns and starts talking before he can see who it is, “Listen, I'm not in the mood-”

“You're not _actually_ mad, are you?”

Dwalin's staring at him, a baffled smile on his face.

“What if I am? Didn't you have a water pipe to fix anyway?”

“The kids were _playing_.”

“I didn't feel like having snowballs thrown at me, that's all.”

Dwalin scoffs, “Jesus, they're _kids_. There's no need to treat them that way.”

Thorin shrugs and makes himself tea, his hands still numb from the cold.

“Thorin.”

“ _What is it, Dwalin_?”

Dwalin glares at Thorin, irritated by the tone, “ _Right_ , sorry I asked.”

“I'm just in a bad mood, people get bad moods, it's a thing that _happens_.” Thorin digs through the drawer for a spoon to stir his tea with. The sarcasm in his voice is unmistakable. Dwalin opens his palms at him and Thorin just glances at him and unceremoniously shoves past him.

Dwalin blocks his path by planting his hand against the doorjamb. The tea splashes in the mug but doesn't spill. Thorin raises his eyebrows at Dwalin and waits for an explanation.

“You go out there and apologize to them.”

Thorin scoffs, “ _Excuse me_?”

“They were doing it in good fun. You go out there and apologize to them.”

“I have the _right_ to be angry.”

The arrogant venom forces Dwalin to lower his voice in a growl, not too menacing, but not too forgiving either: “Frerin and Dis did _nothing_ wrong. It's not their fault you woke up on the wrong side of the fucking bed.”

“Can I please come through?”

Dwalin points a finger at Thorin, “Only after you promise you'll apologize.”

Thorin stares at Dwalin, his blue eyes two sarcastic, exasperated holes in the middle of his face, and then scoffs, “I can't believe this.”

“What? First time anyone's called you out on your shit?”

Thorin clenches his jaw and narrows his eyes at Dwalin. Dwalin doesn't relent, his expression a stern, unreadable bronze door. He hasn't shaved, Thorin notices, the stubble a little more unkept than usual. But the last phrase stung. God, it _stung_.

Thorin sighs and avoids Dwalin's gaze.

“ _Thorin_.” MacFundin says, his tone similar to a cross parent's talking to a whiny, arrogant child, “Come on. Apologize to the kids.”

“You're not my _mother_ ,” Thorin snarls, ducking beneath Dwalin's outstretched arm. Dwalin turns, “The kids think they've done something wrong, _Thorin_ , come on.”

“No.” he stubbornly replies, starting to march up the stairs. Dwalin follows him as he walks up, “I refuse to let you make me feel guilty over this. _They_ were doing it _for fun_ , and _I_ got _angry_ about it. That's all that happened. I'm not going to ask them for an apology and they shouldn't expect one from me. Now excuse me but I have a shower to take, I'm freezing.”

Dwalin calls after Thorin but Thorin's already slammed his bedroom door behind him.

* * *

 

“You really have to stop doing this. You'll catch pneumonia eventually. Or bronchitis. Or something like that.”

“Relax, I'm wearing a sweater, believe it or not.”

Thorin leans against his windowsill. The stars reflect in the snow and vice versa, and yet Dwalin's just a darker figure in the blackness below him.

“Besides, I thought you were angry?”

“Angry? What for?”

“Well, you yelled at me earlier.”

Dwalin parts his lips, furrows his brow and realizes he has to look for the correct words all. He drowns in himself for a moment and giggles softly, sadly, because here is a boy who equates mistakes with rage and rage with punishment, and the book's pages come undone in his hands as he tries to read it, soft dust coating his fingers. He rubs his eyes.

“What is it?” Thorin asks, startled by the sudden quiet.

“Nothing, sweetheart... _angel_. You just seemed... off, today. That's all. But I'm not angry.”

Dwalin won't admit that he's worried, though. Just that Thorin seemed off. Just that it was strange to not-argue in the kitchen. It was strange to see Thorin's jaw tighten. It was strange to see him anything more or anything different from the awkward seventeen year old he's used to.

“I'm tired. It's normal.”

“You sure?” Dwalin involuntarily shivers and the shiver makes its way into his teeth as he speaks: they chatter and trample the question.

“You're freezing, come inside.”

“Thorin, I'm fine, really.”

“I don't _want you to get sick_.” Oakenshield whispers a little louder, to make sure his words are heard. And then comes the sound of him closing the window and Dwalin stands with snow piling on him and his body trembling despite the _sweater_ he's wearing. Thorin turns a corner, snow crunching under his slippers, and Dwalin can look at him. He will have to get used to this, he thinks, but for now Thorin's messy bedhair is enough to render him speechless until he says,

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you someplace warm, you humongous oaf.”

Dwalin smiles in delight and wonder at the boy who's shoving him inside the house and wrapping him in a blanket before hissing, “Take your boots off, _don't make any noise_.”

Dwalin dutifully complies, gingerly grabbing his boots and holding them above ground so they don't trail muddy snow everywhere. Thorin pushes Dwalin up the stairs, “ _Careful_ ,” MacFundin giggles, but after shushing him, all Thorin does is tiptoe past Frerin's open bedroom door and signal him to do the same.

Thorin is, in this moment, infinitely grateful his father sleeps with the door sealed shut.

Oakenshield creaks his door open and tenses, waiting for anyone to notice. Nobody does, and the only person staring at him is Dwalin, wrapped in the blanket, sheepish grin on his face, eyes brimming with delight and wonder and love.

Thorin steps in, still facing Dwalin, and when Dwalin closes the door behind him he dips his head forward and they kiss before he can stop himself and warn himself about what he's about to do. Dwalin's hands snake under Thorin's shirt and Oakenshield jumps.

“Holy _shit_. You're freezing.”

“Sorry.”

Thorin ushers Dwalin towards the bed, “Under the covers, _now_. Now. Come on.”

“Thorin--” Dwalin protests, but he's laughing.

“No, don't you _Thorin_ me.”

Oakenshield pulls Dwalin's soaking sweater off of him and shoves him onto the mattress, wraps his scrawny body around him, pulling the covers over both of them and despite it all, Dwalin is grateful to be able to stick his ice-cold hands between Thorin's who, for once in his life, is actually _warmer_ than someone else. Thorin nuzzles Dwalin's neck and Dwalin buries his face in his hair, pulls him close against his chest. He basks in the warmth and sighs. Thorin is resting his cheek to Dwalin's chest and smiling, still clutching his hands. Dwalin presses his lips to Thorin's forehead and Thorin catches MacFundin's lips with his. They share the kiss quietly, a breath and nothing more, and then Thorin's back to holding Dwalin, rubbing his arms to warm them.

Dwalin says nothing for a little while. He runs a hand through Thorin's hair and Thorin purrs, a quiet sound. Dwalin circles Thorin's body with his arms and lips find lips again, this time a little deeper.

Dwalin breaks away from the kiss, “I have an idea,” he whispers, happy to finally be able to feel his feet and hands again, and his nose, of course, along with his ears.

“Something tells me I won't like this.”

“Oh, nonsense. Get up, come on.”

Thorin narrows his eyes, “ _What_ are you thinking of doing?”

“I want you to meet my friends. I want--”

 _I want you_ , he nearly catches himself saying but that would be foolish, that wouldn't be like him. He swallows and smiles instead. But he wants him. God, he wants him. Every inch every breath every thought. Thorin presses both palms to his chest and Dwalin thinks he is going to lose his mind.

 _God, grant me the courage_.

He brushes his lips to Thorin's ear and he whispers, “ _I want you_ ,” completes the phrase.

Thorin pulls back, eyebrows knitted together, and looks at him. Dwalin bites his tongue and curses himself.

“It's perfectly okay if you don't--”

“I do.”

Oakenshield swallows and averts his gaze, “I _do_ , Dwalin. Only not... not _here_. Not where my dad could-”

“I know. That's why I said it.”

He presses his lips to Thorin's with a definite hunger, and Thorin's stomach gives. His head spins with trepidation and terror and excitement and tiredness, too, sudden weight in his bones. He crawls out of his bed, finds a pair of pants, feels his cheeks blaze when Dwalin kisses him again, and suddenly he's not so sure he'll be able to make it up to the car, up to wherever Dwalin wants them to go. Suddenly he thinks he will sin where the cross he will be crucified to is destined to rise.

He clutches onto Dwalin's shirt, “Grab a coat.” MacFundin says, stilling his hands, stilling himself from touching any more skin, stilling himself from taking Thorin then and there, on the floor, in the bed, _it doesn't matter_.

He puts his sweater back on as Thorin bundles up against the cold.

Thorin has been waiting for this moment for so long and now it is here, _I do_ , like a wedding vow only soaked in blood, I _do_ , _take me now_ , _God take me into your arms, forgive me, make me scream your name until I am a sobbing mess._

Dwalin opens the window. Thorin stares at it.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you're doing?” but Dwalin's already hauled a leg over the windowsill.

“Quickest way out.”

“Do you ever stop to think that your stupidity might get you _hurt_ one day?”

“Never.”

He's grinning.

Dwalin grabs Thorin's shirt and this time there's tongue and a small moan and hands against napes pushing them together so that Thorin's teeth accidentally hit Dwalin's lip. Thorin giggles and then grabs Dwalin's face.

“You are a _menace_ ,” he growls, the smile never leaving his face.

“I know.” Dwalin says, hands slipping around the small of Thorin's back. He pulls him close against him for a last kiss and then climbs down the wall, uses the old water pipes and Valerie's old plant supports as help. He slips and falls when he's a few centimeters above the ground, and lands with a grunt.

“Are you all right?” Thorin asks, alarmed.

“I'm fine. Now c'mon, we haven't got all night.”

Thorin suspiciously eyes Dwalin and the wall.

“I'm scared I'll get hurt.”

“If you fall, I'll catch you.”

“Believe it or not, you're _not_ a reassurance. Shocking, I know.”

Dwalin laughs and Thorin nervously stares at the windowsill.

He clears his throat, “Do you mind if I... come out the, uh. The _normal_ way.”

Dwalin beams up at him, “ _Not at all_.”

* * *

The heat of their hands searching for each other makes up for the broken radiator. Dwalin presses his lips to Thorin's neck and kisses, licks, he bites. Thorin drags him close to his body as much as he can.

But the car is small and neither of them are exactly tiny boys.

“How about-- how about we head inside, yeah? Someplace warm?”

Thorin feels innocence melt away with every word he says. Dwalin straightens himself and clears his throat and then licks his lips and he can't stop himself from kissing Thorin again, nibbling on his lower lip, “Yeah. Yeah, why not.”

Thorin allows himself to be slammed against the wall even before they reach the entrance door. The neighborhood isn't exactly the best and Oakenshield isn't entirely sure the people living in the building he's currently being kissed against have a strictly legal permit to live there but then Dwalin's raking his teeth down his neck and Thorin is whimpering. He is weak.

God, he is so _weak_.

He wishes he had the courage to let his hand wander between Dwalin's legs, Dwalin grabs his hand, breathless form the kiss, his mohawk already a sweaty mess. He opens the door.

“Everyone, this is Thorin. Thorin, this is everyone.”

A colorful array of punks and social misfits collectively mumble a “Hey,” many not even looking up from what they're doing. Thorin recognizes a few from last summer's party. Nobody seems too surprised that Dwalin's heading upstairs with a boy.

There's loud music playing.

Dwalin opens a rickety door and sighs as he turns on the light. There's a camping bed in the middle of the room and a small plastic bedside table. A girl's lying in the middle of it.

“Ashley, get out.” Dwalin barks.

“Hey, Dwals,” the girl mumbles. Thorin notices the needles but says nothing. The girl tilts her upside down head at Thorin and grins at him, “He's cute. Nice eyes.”

Thorin lowers his gaze and blushes.

“All right, c'mon.” Dwalin says, gingerly picking her up alongside with her needles and waterworks, pinkish with blood. She shakily walks, grips his arm as tight as she can. Long hair that falls over her face in tendrils, her smile widens when she walks past Thorin.

She glances back at him, “Nice arse,” she mumbles.

“Mack!” Dwalin yells over the noise from downstairs, “ _Mack_!”

Mack seems to be a petite girl with short cropped hair, nose pierced and olive skin an array of tattoos. She glances at Thorin warily as she hops up the last few steps.

“ _Shit_. Was she in your room again?”

“Yeah. It's fine. It's fine.”

Dwalin hands Ashley to Mack with the delicacy that only people scared of breaking the things they're holding can show, “I'm sorry, Dwals,” Ashley mumbles.

“It's fine, Ash. It really is.”

He smiles at Mack and then turns back to Thorin. Thorin's nervously playing with the hem of his sleeve.

“Sorry about that.”

“You _live here_?” The tone of his voice is maybe a bit more disgusted than he'd like, and Dwalin notices it and clenches his jaw, “I thought you, y'know. Lived with Balin.”

“I sleep here when I can't handle the quiet. That's the problem with Balin's home, it's too quiet. I can hear myself think.”

Dwalin stops before closing the door.

“If you don't like it, I can drive you home. But they're my friends. This is my space. This is where I feel safe.”

His grey eyes are vulnerable, his body is so tense it is not. Thorin stares at the door and then glances at the camping bed and then back at Dwalin waiting.

New, this is what he feels. New. Scorched, maybe, by cleansing flames. Or blessed by icy kisses-- he doesn't know. Maybe he'll never want to know. All Thorin hopes is that kissing Dwalin right now will be enough of an apology (he can tell MacFundin's hurt by his last comment).

Dwalin closes his eyes when they kiss. It's Thorin who closes the door.

The music is a muffled pulse beneath their feet, as Dwalin leads Thorin to the bed and Thorin knows all of a sudden his heart will burst overnight. He doesn't even know what time it is. He doesn't even know if it's the middle of the night or the crack of dawn, doesn't even know if he'll find his father waiting for him when he comes home.

For the first time in his stupid, ridiculous life, _it does not matter_.

Dwalin pushes him onto the bed and crawls between his legs, kisses him again.

Thorin, for the weeks to come, will be able to pinpoint the moment between sanity and insanity, the moment between being himself and then definitely losing all preconceptions he had in favor of letting his soul burst from between his teeth.

The moment is when he relaxes enough to allow Dwalin's tongue against his.

The moment afterwards is when he recognizes his hands as they take off Dwalin's sweater, seamless from heartbeat to breath, and Dwalin helps him, and Dwalin feels his goosebumps when he takes Thorin's shirt off, coat and scarf and hoodie long discarded on the floor.

Dwalin runs his hand along Thorin's chest and rests his palm against it, thumb hovering close to his nipple.

Thorin leans forward and kisses him deep. He no longer has any idea of what he is doing, only that if this is love then it is madness and he wants it, every bit of it.

It hurts and it burns and it is beautiful.

He kisses deep and Dwalin leans back a little and takes his own shirt off, too. Thorin swallows when he sees the shoulders, the neck, his breath hitches. He knows he's gaping.

“Like what you see?” Dwalin purrs.

“You're a jerk,” Thorin mumbles, distracted.

Dwalin trails his lips against his neck and drags him back to earth, feels the other boy’s pulse quicken as his breaths grow slightly heavy, their bare chests barely brushing together before Dwalin moves up to his jaw, butterfly kisses before their lips meet, tongues snaking against each other and urgency growing, fingers clutching and drawing close and touching.  
  
Until Thorin pulls back for air and to calm his heart beat that’s booming through his throat, and Dwalin stops his fingers and his breathing.  
  
Their foreheads meet because Thorin pulls them together.  
  
"You okay?" the older boy asks and Oakenshield smiles and nods, "Yeah. Just scared."  
  
"Just scared?"  
  
"A little."  
  
"I can stop if you want. We don’t have to go all the way."  
  
But it’s Thorin who shakes his head and brings their lips together again, suddenly, Thorin’s hands that snake against Dwalin’s hip and squeeze, Thorin who shifts his weight so that MacFundin’s on his back and he’s on top of him, “ _I want you_ ,” he shyly whispers, and suddenly his eyes seem brighter than they’ve ever been.

Dwalin drags Thorin down in yet another kiss that grows in rhythm, that grows in quickness, and all of a sudden his hands are dancing, fumbling with Thorin's belt and jeans. Their tongues meet, Dwalin's fingers tangle with Thorin's hair as Thorin kicks his pants off and once again finds himself under Dwalin. MacFundin slips his own pants off.

And then they're both naked, underwear on the floor along with their clothes.

Dwalin kisses Thorin's neck, Thorin closes his eyes. He squirms when Dwalin's palms touch his thighs and he stares at the ceiling, past Dwalin's head. His hands and feet are cold but the heat between his legs makes up for it, it flows through his blood to the tip of his fingers and toes. He pulls himself up to kiss Dwalin.

Dwalin wraps a hand around Thorin's cock, and Thorin moans while he kisses him, sudden, the air leaving his chest and his mind. Dwalin starts moving his hand and Thorin closes his eyes, slightly jerks his head to the side. Part of his lips still connected to Dwalin's face, the rest slightly open, feeding ragged breaths into MacFundin's ear.

This is nothing like his own hand.

This is nothing like his fantasies.

He grinds himself into Dwalin's touch as Dwalin picks up the pace, Thorin's breathing becoming a hiccup, Dwalin's lips curling into a grin.

He can feel Dwalin, hard, pressing against his pelvis.

Thorin presses his cheek against Dwalin's.

And then it dawns on him he is having sex for the first time in his life.

The thought is elation and terror combined, soon swallowed by pleasure. When Dwalin lets go of him he keens, MacFundin delicately pushing him back so that Thorin lies down, only to moan when he feels the heat of MacFundin's tongue against his already sensitive foreskin.

Thorin fists the sheets and opens his eyes and moans. He stares at the ceiling and whimpers.

Dwalin starts slow, from the base to the tip and back down and then again, from the base to the tip, every twitch an ocean in his mind, every ragged gasp the rumble of thunder. Thorin breathes through his nose and is certain his sanity will not survive the night intact.

Already he feels himself coil and tighten, white-hot, the sound of his own whimpers distant and repetitive litanies. All that matters is Dwalin's head between his legs. All that matters is Dwalin's hands squeezing his thighs.

And then Dwalin's kissing him again, he tastes himself, tastes his own salt and it drives him deeper inside himself. Thorin wraps his legs around Dwalin's hips without even noticing. Dwalin lets out a small sigh when he grinds against him.

Thorin forces the image of his father's rage out of his mind.

“Can I--” and for a second Dwalin stops to think and searches for the words but words are madness, right now, they are difficult to even begin to grasp, with Thorin beneath him naked and hard and eyes so blue they look like made of stars, with Thorin moaning and whimpering and sighing against his skin, “can I fuck you?” he asks.

Not exactly poetic, but Dwalin's never been a poet.

Thorin brings their lips together, almost close enough to kiss but not quite. Dwalin's head spins with all the beauty he is being subject to right now, as their breathing is one and when Thorin talks their lips barely brush together.

A tease.

“ _Take me_ ,” Thorin whispers, his voice thick with want, the phrase spoken by someone who is and isn't him at the same time. He fears for a moment he is losing himself but on the other hand he knows he is not, that he is and he isn't. That he is falling but he does not care. Dwalin's subsequent kiss is made of hunger. Thorin wraps his arms around him and all he feels is the heat coming from MacFundin's body, into his, he needs it he needs it he needs it-- _God_ , broken whispers ready to tumble through his fingers into the air.

Dwalin untangles himself from their embrace and finds lube and a condom on the table next to the bed.

He readies a finger, sleek, and then looks up at Thorin- Thorin who's staring at him, Thorin who cannot allow himself to stop and think about what's happening, Thorin who is a wonder and a delight.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

All Thorin does is nod.

“Just relax.”

He slips a finger in him and Thorin tenses immediately, “ _Breathe_ ,” Dwalin whispers, and he does, relaxes a little.

“Are you _sure_?”

“Yes, yes, I'm sure-- just _fuck me already_.”

Thorin's exasperated tone rips a giggle from Dwalin's throat, who starts thrusting his finger. Thorin swallows and his head bends back, “Jesus,” he mumbles. Dwalin's almost tempted to stop and ask if he's okay, but he figures he'll tell him if things get too uncomfortable.

He presses a second finger in, sleek with lube, and Thorin mewls. He buries his teeth in his lower lip.

If this is going mad for the rest of his life, for the hundredth millionth time then so be it-- because this insanity is unlike any other. This insanity is the epitome of it, and the darkness and the light.

When Dwalin pulls his hand out and aligns himself with Thorin after having slipped the condom on, Thorin shuts his eyes, and breathes.

“Just-- just pull your legs up. Over my shoulders,” Dwalin whispers.

Thorin does, and Dwalin exclaims, “ _Jesus_ -” because Thorin's left foot's just accidentally hit the side of Dwalin's head.

“Oh my _God_ ,” Thorin yelps, pushing himself up against his elbows. Dwalin's massaging his temple, hair falling in front of his eyes. He pulls his legs down and Thorin's hands hover close to MacFundin's cheek. Dwalin eyes him.

“Did I _hurt you_?” Oakenshield asks, utterly mortified.

Dwalin starts laughing, one hand on the mattress, the other holding Thorin's shoulder. Thorin narrows his eyes at him.

“I'm _fine_ , Thorin-- I'm fine. I've had worse things done to me.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm fine,” Dwalin chuckles, slips an arm around Thorin, delicately pushes him back down onto the bed. “I'm fine,” he whispers, tone turning to roses, and kisses him again.

They melt into one, and it burns in every way Thorin had never imagined.

* * *

 

Morning light finds them curled within each other, Thorin's back against Dwalin's chest, Dwalin's arm circling Oakenshield's hips, their hands latched together, their breathing regular, the same.

Thorin's the first one to stir, and he shakes his head. It takes him a moment to wake up, it takes him a moment to realize where he is.

He feels the weight of Dwalin's arms around him but it doesn't fully register for the first few seconds he's awake. And then it does.

The erratic shards of the night before connect into a shattering mirror that breaks against the notion that he's in bed with a boy and he's not in his house and if his father finds out he'll have to _explain and atone for his sins_ , and Thorin pulls himself up, winter chill seeping from both inside his bones and outside, where the broken window lets the morning in.

Dwalin stirs as he pries his arm off of him.

“Hey,” MacFundin mumbles, grabs Thorin in his still lingering sleep and drags him in for a goodmorning kiss. They both still taste of each other. Thorin tenses, Dwalin notices.

He pulls back as Thorin swallows and rolls off the bed and picks up his clothes.

Thorin's hands are shaking. Dwalin notices and comes up to him.

“Hey. Hey. What's going on?”

“Nothing, it's fine.”

But it's _not_ , Jesus Christ it is not. It is not.

The shaking gets worse.

“Hey.” Dwalin repeats and grabs Thorin's trembling hands, “ _Hey_.”

“It's all right.”

“No it's not.”

Thorin freezes, still naked, stares at Dwalin. Dwalin cups his cheek with his hand and runs a thumb along Thorin's stubble.

“Jesus, you're beautiful,” he whispers. It makes Thorin blush.

“I've never seen eyes so beautiful. You know that, yes? You have the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. Blue. They're so bloody fucking _blue_.”

Thorin smiles but the uneasiness is palpable.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“What? No, no. It's not you, Dwals. I _swear_ it's not you.”

Thorin slithers his hands out of Dwalin's grasp, starts getting dressed.

“I just-- I really need to get home.”

“Thorin--” Dwalin says but then stops before pressing the question any further, because Thorin looks up at him with completely _terrified_ eyes.

He regrets this. He regrets every step of the way and hates himself for, deep down, not regretting it one bit.

“I really _do_ need to get home before Father finds out.”

Dwalin nods. He stands and steals a kiss from Thorin's forehead, a kiss Oakenshield leans into despite his heart being a terrified rabbit trying to find refuge.

 _I love you_ , Dwalin wants to say, _he can't hurt you while you're here with me_.

He doesn't say either of those things, but at least once they get close to Oakenshield Manor, Thorin kisses him goodbye.

And Dwalin watches him walk all the way back home, as dawn creeps through the winter, snow-heavy clouds. He smiles to himself.

And as he walks quietly through the house to not wake anyone up, Thorin smiles too.

His chest is a broken coil. His mind is a burning tower.

His cheeks burn with blush.

Thorin isn't sure he knows who he's becoming. He figures he'll learn it along the way.

He figures they both will.

And light has just started to shine through.


	11. x

“No. Out of the question.”

“You'll love it. _You'll love it_.”

Dwalin grabs Thorin's waist before Thorin can crawl off the bed. He pulls him back under the covers and eyes him. Thorin sighs and tries to untangle himself from Dwalin's arms, but Dwalin's grip is iron, it's a kiss against his collarbone.

Thorin pushes him away before he can start sucking on skin, or move down to his nipple, or move up to his neck and his jaw.

“I'm not gonna do it.”

“Oh, _come on_. You're gay, right? Then you gotta--”

Thorin blinks at Dwalin, “I'm not gay.”

Dwalin gapes at Thorin for a second and then tells himself to decide to ignore it, “All right. Maybe your ideas aren't clear  _yet_ . But c'mon, Blue Eyes--”

“What did you just call me?”

“Blue Eyes, why?”

Thorin starts laughing. It is a genuinely surprised sound, the type of sound a boy makes when he's never received a petname, never cuddled, never thought he was ever even  _deserving_ of one. Dwalin smiles uncertainly at him, “What, what's so funny?”

“... _Blue Eyes_?”

“Yeah, 'cause your eyes are fucking blue. Now, it's not even a _proper protest_ , it's just a small demonstration. You've never even been to Pride, this is _a quarter of the size_ of Pride.”

Thorin stills Dwalin's gesticulating hands, “I'm not gonna do it, Dwalin.”

“Why not? Give me a good reason.”

Thorin sighs and stands. This time, Dwalin doesn't try to stop him. Oakenshield hastily puts his clothes back on, “I need to get home.”

“Tell him you slept at my brother's place.”

Thorin frowns at him.

“I _want_ you to come, Thorin.”

Thorin rubs his face with his hands, fingers to his temples, “I have no way of... of weaseling myself out of it, Dwals. I was  _there_ when he went to bed and if I come with you, I  _won't be_ when he wakes up.”

He glances nervously at the window and doesn't know what he expected to see: his father, maybe, peering in? Or simply dawn, come to save him and give him an excuse to leave. Instead Dwalin stands, still naked, and grabs his hands and brings his knuckles up to his lips. Grey blue eyes meet Thorin's as Dwalin kisses his fingers one by one.

“Please.”

Thorin rolls his eyes.

“It's still early. The march starts at noon, you can go home, I'll pick you up, and it'll be done. There. Easy peasy.”

Thorin shakes his head, “I already--” but when Dwalin cups his face with his hand he curses him in every language that goes beyond the stars: not out loud, just underneath his tongue, galaxies dripped in fire burning as he screams at him out of frustration through his fingertips.

He bats the hand away, one part annoyance, three parts jokingly. Dwalin scoffs and kisses him instead, hands moving down to playfully grope Thorin's ass, and Thorin slams both hands on Dwalin's chest and tries not to giggle, “No,  _no_ , don't you  _dare_ try and sway me with  _sex_ . You  _pervert_ , you--”

“But I'm your favourite pervert, aren't I?”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Thorin hisses, Dwalin's hands on either side of his face, he smiles and he knows this and Dwalin indulges him with the taste of his lips: a slow kiss, lips soft, lips wet, Thorin parting his teeth ever slightly.

“Come back to bed,” Dwalin whispers, his voice huskier than when all this started, “just for a moment.”

His hands rush down to the small of Thorin's back and then lower still again. Thorin's breath hitches.

“I'll need to be home soon-”

“ _Just for a moment_.”

There's lips against Thorin's neck, a hand under a shirt, Dwalin's thumb slipped into Thorin's mouth. MacFundin nibbles Thorin's earlobe and Thorin breathes, “You  _bastard_ .”

But he's smiling, body trembling, voice shaking.

And then his clothes are on the floor, there's a condom wrapper in the trash and they're laughing, they're giggling, sighing, grasping for purchase on one another-- they fall apart.

* * *

His sister opens the door. No,  _opens_ is much too kind: Dis slams the door open and marches into her eldest brother's room. 

It's half past eleven, he's still in bed, his hair's a mess, there's love bites all over his chest and his collarbones. But, most importantly,  _god he needs sleep_ .

“Tho.” his sister calls.

“ _What_?”

“There's someone for you.”

He groans.

“If it's Balin, tell him--”

“It's Dwalin.”

Thorin peeks out of his mess of blankets and blinks at his sister, “What?”

“Your new friend. I like him, he's sweet.”

“He's... here?”

“Yeah.”

“Does Father know?”

Frerin walks by, “They're both sitting in the living room I think attempting  _idle conversation_ . Do save them both. For our own reputation's sake.”

Thorin swallows and murmurs,

“ _Shit_.”

* * *

Dwalin pokes the china teacup in front of him with a dubious, tentative finger. Thrain stares at him, equally tense.

One jaw is set in stone.

The other's just...  _awkward_ .

The spoon falls out of the cup and Dwalin quickly and clumsily puts it back in, splashes tea onto the coffee table.

Thrain sighs and sets his own down.

He then eyes Dwalin, and Dwalin feels his gaze scrutinize every inch of him.

Mohawk, earrings, makeup, leather jacket.

The scar, of course, and the broken nose.

Dwalin stares at his feet, hands laced, elbows on his knees, and has nothing better do to.

“So what do you _do_ , Dwalin? Apart from the odd few jobs around my house, of course.”

Thrain leans back as he waits for the answer and Dwalin swallows, furrows his brow, “I... help Balin, mainly.”

“Yes. I've seen you around the office a few times. You seem to enjoy carrying those boxes.”

Dwalin furrows his brow but is careful not to make eye contact.

“I...yeah.”

“And of course, there's my son's Maths lessons.”

Dwalin wonders if Thrain's just being subtly judging or is actually (and quite badly) attempting at making proper small talk-- and if that's the case, then God, it really  _is_ true: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

A clock ticks.

He decides to attempt to look at the older man and ends up  _staring at him_ despite himself. Thrain stares back waiting for an answer.

Dwalin starts wondering whether he should just leave, but the tension from his hands dissipates the moment he sees Thorin run down the stairs two steps at a time. Dwalin stands up and Thrain turns and stands too. Thorin skits to a halt in front of the two, and grins awkwardly at Dwalin, the grin taking a nervous turn when he looks at Thrain.

“Hey there.” Thorin mumbles, at both but most of all at Dwalin, slightly light-headed, slightly scared. He fights the blush and loses.

“Would you mind explaining why your friend is here, Thorin?”

And then, it looks like Thorin's just been hit, as easy as turning a page, and Thorin swallows and wipes his hands on his jeans, tension suddenly cutting his tongue from his mouth and it rests there, throbbing blood between his teeth, for a full minute-- he is not a good liar, not to his father, never to his father no, you cannot lie in the face of God, you cannot lie in the face of vengeance terrible, you cannot lie in the face of the law.

Dwalin sees all this and feels his entire chest collapse, lungs and heart shriveling and dying to make way for Thorin, for those sudden sad blue eyes, make way for that trembling mind of his, those nervous skittish hands. Make way for Thorin, all of him, every nightmare and missed opportunity and desperate need for approval-- and Dwalin comes to his rescue, quietly, like always, a stone against the waves that tear his flesh apart, “Wanted to see how the repairs on your Roadster were doing, thought I'd take her out on a spin, Thorin asked if he could come too.”

Thorin glances at Dwalin, brow furrowed in confusion. It doesn't relax when Dwalin glances at him and certainly doesn't relax when his father tuts doubtfully.

“I didn't know you were interested in cars, Thorin.”

“I'm no--”

“It's more to get him out of the house, really. Just to get him out of the house.”

Dwalin grins at Thrain and Thorin holds his own hands with shaking fingers. He swallows, he breathes,

he waits.

“Oh, very well. But don't be too late.”

Thorin nearly thanks him, but then he has to remind himself his father is not a ghost, his father is real- he owes it no prayers of thanks and no offerings of blood. He owes his father nothing, for a moment, and then he is back to knowing far too well that he owes his father everything he is.

A chain around his feet, a block of cement dragging him down, lungs spasming as they search for air in water that cannot offer it to them. But it is not the water's fault.

The lungs were never trained to breathe in salt and rivers.

“Are we really taking the _Roadster_?” Thorin asks Dwalin as they quickly walk down the path, his breath coming in icy puffs, and he's just glanced at his father staring at them from the living room glass doors.

“Are you _insane_? If I as much _ruin_ one of your dad's cars, I'm toast!”

Dwalin quickens his pace and Thorin smiles, and laughs, and is more than glad to cram himself in Balin's small yellow car.

* * *

But Thorin's palms start sweating when he sees the first people who are gathering as they drive up the street, and there's pressure on his chest that slowly builds. Dwalin parks the car and opens the door, “All right, here we are.” but Thorin doesn't budge, doesn't move, stares at the dashboard.

“Thorin?”

Thorin takes a deep breath and simply shakes his head. He allows his gaze to flicker to Dwalin for a moment, Dwalin who pulls his leg back into the car and shuts the door, stares at the boy sitting next to him.

“Thorin?” he asks again.

“I can't _do this_ ,” Thorin admits, his voice barely a whisper, “I'm _sorry_.”

Thorin feels his father's gaze and the lie he's told to get here make it hard to breathe and Thorin feels the shame and the hurt, “I'm so  _sorry_ ,” he says again, “but this is too. It's too much. It's  _too much_ . It's too, too  _flamboyant_ .”

Three words too much, and Dwalin pulls back.

“Too _flamboyant_.” MacFundin sourly repeats.

A world that's not Thorin's, a burning star when he is the smallest, heaviest rock. He wants to cry and tells himself not to. He wants to run back all the way home, where the hate is thick inside his chest, cobwebs, but at least he is safe in his pain and his solitude. It's easy to be gay when you do not have to scream it to the world, it's easy to love a boy when it's hidden, far away, when it's private and no one else knows and it's between four walls, a mattress, a floor. It's easy to be yourself when you do not have to see its reflection every day in the world outside's words.

“It's too... gay for me, Dwalin.”

“Too gay. A _gay_ march for _gay_ rights is _too gay_ for you.”

Thorin says he's not gay like a boy grasping for straws, like a boy whose hands are scraping against rock for purchase. He does not know who he is, does not know what he is or what he deserves to call himself. He repeats the phrase said that morning, as if it were a spell. A ward against himself. Against his father.

Dwalin squeezes the steering wheel with knuckles whitening, “Then explain  _this_ .” he snarls, gestures at nothing in particular but them, them sharing a car, them sharing a bed, sharing bodies and kisses and hands.

“Explain _me_.”

Thorin pleads by saying his name but Dwalin shakes his head, “No. No,  _you don't get to walk away from this_ . You don't get to  _pick and choose_ . You're not gay only when it suits you, when you want me to fuck you, that's not how this  _works_ .”

Thorin stares at his hands and sniffles and Dwalin rubs his face with his hands, “That's not how this  _works_ , Oakenshield.”

“I'm sorry.” Thorin murmurs and Dwalin wants to scream.

_Stop being so afraid_ he wants to scream.  _Stop hiding_ ,  _stop trying to break yourself into what you think is normal_ .

_I love you, you idiot._

_**Please let me save you** _ .

That is not the way he should think, he knows this. Dwalin cannot afford tying his sadness to Thorin's. The roots will grow from one heart to the next, and they will both be dragged to ashes. The quietness that follows should not be allowed to fester.

Thorin lets out a small sigh and his face is graced by a shaking, trembling smile.

“It's fine, I can walk home.”

Dwalin laughs quietly to himself and shakes his head, heels of his palms to his forehead.

“I just wish you'd understand there's nothing wrong with you.”

Thorin stills his hand before it reaches the door handle.

“What?”

“There is nothing that has to be fixed, Thorin, _nothing_. You're beautiful, you're beautiful. Hey. _Hey._ Look at me, _look at me_ \--”

Dwalin stills Thorin before he can slip out of the car, his hand under his chin and then halfway between his cheek and his neck. MacFundin smiles at the boy in front of him: his eyes shine, crow's feet, dimples that try to chase the doubt away. 

“You don't have to _hide_. Not here.”

Thorin pulls back but Dwalin's hand doesn't move from his neck. “You make it sound so  _ easy _ , Dwalin.”

“Because it is.”

“For you, maybe.” Thorin whispers hoarsely.

“You owe this to yourself, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin stares through the windshield and all energy leaves his limbs: he becomes a shell, so hollow he does not know if breathing is worth the effort. He becomes a form of ashes, dust blowing in the wind. He wants to cry. He wants to cry as hard as he can.

Dwalin covers his hand with his and swallows, “I can't _do this_ , Dwalin.”

He's so scared.

He's so scared because they are _deviants_ and _perverts_ and walking out would mean forever marking himself as one of them. They are deviants. He is, _he is_ \--

_But you can't just pick and choose_ .

“Come on, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin sighs. He waits a few more moments, tense moments, in which he's certain Dwalin'll kick him out of the car, exasperated, angry. But Dwalin doesn't move, watches him like you would watch smoke caught in the breeze.

“Thorin?” he asks one last time.

“Well look who's _back_.” Ashley laughs. She seems sober, her hair pulled back in a bun. Mack is next to her. They're holding hands. A boy zooms by them, wearing nothing but leather shorts in the freezing cold weather, and Thorin's eyes widen.

It's when Dwalin wraps an arm around his scrawny shoulders that he flinches and blushes.

“Oh, look at that, _he's shy_.” Mack says, and pinches his cheek. Thorin wants to claw the flesh off his bones. Dwalin tightens his hold around his shoulder, and Thorin wants to claw the felsh off his bones.

Thorin wishes he could throw himself in the Thames out of feeling out of place. The two girls giggle some more and then fall deep into conversation with Dwalin, and his gaze wanders, his ears slowly lose the threads of what they're saying, and he looks at the small crowd assembled, the few signs, hand-made, and God, where is he,  _where on earth is he_ \--

this isn't him. This is someone else walking his shoes, someone brave, someone who  _knows who he is_ , someone who deserves to know his own name and look himself in the eye. This is not where he is supposed to be.

Ash and Mack wander away.

Dwalin slips his arm around Thorin's hip, brings him close to himself when they start to walk. MacFundin's floating all of a sudden in a sky of blue and he presses his lips to Thorin's temple, so fragile so thin so  _beautiful_ , and it is these moments where Thorin wishes he were brave, these moments where Thorin wishes he were worthy, because guilt is a close friend and a heavy hand, and he swallows and Thorin pulls back. He wriggles himself out of Dwalin's embrace.

“You. You, hey. _Hey_.”

Thorin shakes his head at dwalin and runs a hand through his hair and leaves it on the back of his neck to linger (it is not the time for him to feel scars there, not now, not yet- no broken flesh to haunt his dreams, no blood tainting him, no guilt no death no nightmares) and lowers his gaze, “It's fine I just-- I just I don't-- I don't feel like I'm  _me_ .”

Dwalin stops walking and Thorin does too, “What do you mean?”

“It's-- Shit. It's nothing.”

“Thorin. _Thorin_.”

Dwalin instinctively grabs Thorin's face and Thorin pulls away. Dwalin lowers his hands, Dwalin furrows his brow.

“What's _going on_ , Blue Eyes?”

“This... this whole thing, this _protest_ and _your friends_ and. You.”

Thorin sighs and sits on the steps of a home he doesn't know, his back ringing with the impact of the asphalt. Dwalin crouches in front of him and Thorin wishes he could wrestle the concern and the worry from his face. He stares at his hands.

“It's... it's _your world_. Not mine. I don't belong here, I don't--”

“You do.”

“ _Stop it_.”

“But you _do_ belong here. With me, right now.”

Thorin smiles a smirk that's all twisted to the side, “But it's not true.”

“But it is.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because

( _oh say it say it say it you've come this far just say it_ )

_I love you_ .”

Thorin looks at Dwalin as though he's just spoken in a tongue he could never possibly understand.

“And I don't want to hide it. That's why I'm here. That's why you're here. Because we shouldn't _hide_. We shouldn't be _ashamed_.”

MacFundin grabs Thorin's hand and pulls him back up to stand. He kisses him, catches Thorin off guard, “Because every time I look at you I go a little bit crazier and how can I not scream it to the world? You're beautiful, you're  _beautiful_ .”

“Dwalin.”

“And I think _I love you_ , Thorin.”

“ _Dwalin_ \--”

“I think I'm in love with you.” Dwalin grins, “Silly, isn't it?”

Before Thorin can answer, the bottle crashes into the wall next to them and someone yells “Faggots!”

Thorin yelps and flinches.

“Oh, shit,” Dwalin exclaims, and his hand is grabbing Thorin's, and he's starting to run. He sharply turns a corner and lets go of Thorin's hand, “Just keep on running!” he screams.

“Who are they?”

“Nazi scum,” Dwalin grumbles, almost breathless, but he's smiling. He skips and turns, cups his hands around his mouth, “Spineless, _shitfaced_ Nazi scum!” he hollers, and laughs when a thrown rock nearly hits him.

“Turn left,” he playfully barks at Thorin, and Thorin obliges, heart hammering like it's going mad. The confession made only moments before has been momentarily forgotten in favor of survival.

“Do you _know_ where you're going?”

“More or less. Oh _shit_ , I got them _pissed_.”

Dwalin hauls himself into an open door and pushes Thorin in with him. The man at the book shop counter greets them as they rush in, brandishing a broom. As Dwalin roughly slams the door shut behind himself and Thorin, a group of six or seven clean-shaven, burly boys in tight jeans and bomber jackets blindly thunder past the little store.

“ _Out_!”

Thorin freezes, thinking it's done it's over he's  _dead_ , but Dwalin bows exaggeratedly, taking his beanie off in a single overdramatic sweep.

“Andre, I beg of you.”

“Out, out, out right now! Last time you tore the shop apart.”

“Only because we were five against eight, and we would've beaten the shit out of them, but you thought it good to call the bloody _jacks,_ ” Dwalin leans on his knees and tries to catch his breath. He gesticulates towards Thorin, “This is Thorin.”

Oakenshield awkwardly waves. The elderly man narrows his eyes at him.

Thorin tries to smile and figures he looks like an idiot anyway, so why bother.

“So much for your protest,” Andre mumbles.

“Andre, it was _barely_ a march.”

“Now move it, you two, I'd hate to see your noses broken.”

“Wonderful as always, Andre, darling. Remember I am always ready to pay you back anyway you want for your patronage, any sexual favor you desire.” Dwalin winks at the man and Andre rolls his eyes, “ _Leave_ , you scoundrel.”

Dwalin laughs, and slips a blushing Thorin's hand in his.

“Welcome to Soho, kid.” he mumbles, and Thorin decides to stop thinking for the rest of the day, lest he risks going mad for good.

( _you don't belong here_ the little voice snarls. He knows it's right. He knows it's true. He decides to ignore it, embraces the chill in his bones, feels Dwalin's hands warming his).

* * *

The music is loud. The laughter is loud, too, an explosion through the room, and Dwalin dips his head back: his is the loudest and it makes Thorin's heart quake. A boy next to him is pressing an ice pack to his cheek. Ash'll need stitches.

Thorin and Dwalin were lucky. Oakenshield's sitting close to Dwalin, holding a beer he knows he won't finish drinking and sitting stiffly on the couch.

“And then we just _ran_.”

“Christ, you're insane. You're _insane_.”

“Not bad for your first protest, kid,” someone says, and Thorin awkwardly smiles. His hands are iron-clad.

“Yeah, not bad at all.” Dwalin comments, ruffling Thorin's hair. Thorin downcasts his eyes. He stands up shortly afterwards and slips out into the back garden. The music's a bit too loud. The laughter a bit too jarring. The beer makes his head flutter and spin.

Someone opens the sliding doors behind him and he knows who it is.

“Hey, you. Come back inside. You'll catch a cold.”

Thorin shrugs.

“It's all good.”

Before Thorin can stop it, Dwalin's taken his leather jacket off and wrapped Thorin in it.

“Now _you'll_ be cold.”

It's Dwalin who shrugs this time, and lights himself a cigarette. He sits next to a pot that's also an ashtray.

“Come here, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin stands and stares at him but doesn't move. The earlier confession suddenly hits him as if he were running naked through a snowstorm, cold, terrifying. He searches for warmth in his own hands, when the fire is only a few feet away.

“You said you love me.”

Amazed.

Dwalin's eyes smile although the corners of his mouth don't move, “Yeah. I did.”

“Did you mean it?”

_what happens if he did_ ?

“Yeah, I meant it.”

Dwalin doesn't even pause for a  _breath_ between the question and the answer.

“I meant it.”

Dwalin sees, suddenly, clearly, sitting with goosebumps all over his arms, sees the boy in front of him and knows, more than life itself, more than all the truths he's ever known, more than he knows that water is wet and his mother loves him and the sky won't fall on his head but the roof maybe will, he knows he _loves him_.

After the muddle of the last few months, this clear shard of a thought is more than a breath of fresh air. Dwalin stands up, cigarette between his lips.

“Come here.” he says, palm open. Thorin stares at it.

“There's something I want to give you.”

Thorin wraps himself in his arms, smell of leather filling his nostrils. “Should I trust you?” he asks, and doesn't even know if he's joking anymore.

“If you want to,” Dwalin quips. He smiles as the first snowflakes start to fall.

Their feet hit the stairs and Thorin feels Dwalin's hands pull him close to him, back against the room door, “Wait,” Dwalin says, “wait, wait-- _wait_.”

He pulls back and he grins and scrambles off of the bed.

“How do you feel about needles?” he asks.

Thorin gapes at him for a second, “About _what_?”

“About needles,” Dwalin calls from the bathroom, where he's currently washing his hands.

“Why?” Thorin asks, and swallows. He tilts his head to the side and arches an eyebrow.

“You'd look good with an earring.”

“With a _what_?”

Thorin's scandalized exclamation has Dwalin laughing louder than he has in a while.

“If you want, of course.”

“With an _earring_ , Dwalin?”

Thorin doesn't know whether he should get angry or start laughing out of utter surprise. Dwalin dries his hands off and shrugs.

“You don't have to if you don't want to.”

Oh, this is _mad_. This is mad, mad, mad, the maddest yet-- and madness seems to be somewhat of a fixed point for Thorin now, as he stares at Dwalin and thinks about what's been happening to his life recently and starts laughing. This is like when he wrote D + T =  ♥ in his notebook, like when he kissed him, like when he let him _fuck him_ , like when he marched today, and at the thought of all those things he wants to scream so loud his entire existence is obliterated.

But instead he starts laughing. Hard, and loud. Hysterical for people with a trained ear.

Thorin falls back onto the mattress, holding his stomach.

“What did I do _this time_?”

“You are _out of your mind_ , out of your bloody mind. _Dwalin_ , an earring? With my father the way he is?”

“You can take it out when you're at home.”

Thorin props himself up on his elbows and shakes his head, still smiling.

“You're going back to college next week and I want you to have something that'll remind me of you.”

“Because you _love me_ , I suppose?”

That stings. Dwalin stares at Thorin and Thorin tries to open his mouth to explain-- how can he properly say it, though? That all he's ever been taught is that if you're gay it's about the sex, not the love? And never mind what you tell a punk boy with a broken nose on Parliament Hill while the sun rises, you're just being a fool and a child. It is not about the love.

Not this time, and he knows this. 

He does not deserve it to be about the  _love_ .

But then grey-blues happen, again, like a thousand times before. The fear is paralyzing but then Dwalin bridges the space between them (and it will always be up to him to do so, there is no escaping Thorin's inability to act, it will haunt them to the end of their days) and kisses him.

“You are a _fool_ , Thorin Oakenshield, and you should think before you speak.” MacFundin whispers against Thorin's lips.

It is always about the love.

“So, will it hurt?”

“Will what hurt?”

“The earring.”

Dwalin arches an eyebrow, “That's a quick change of heart.”

“You said it'd suit me, why not give it a try? If worse comes to worst, I can take it out.”

“In answer to your question, it will hurt. Still sure?”

Thorin shrugs.

Dwalin leaves the room and Thorin stares at his Converse (not exactly winter wear, but when he'd found out that Dwalin was  _talking to his father_ he'd grabbed the first shoes he could find) and thinks that by now his father must've noticed they didn't take the Roadster, at all. He stares at his feet in utter terror but before the panic attack can hit Dwalin's back with a bowl full of ice, a needle, a lighter and a small box. He's also holding a cork between his teeth.

“So, is this an earring you switch between lovers or-”

“It's one of mine.”

“ _Hygienic_.”

Dwalin frowns at the sarcasm and pulls the small gold ring out of its box. He ignites the lighter and holds the earring above in the flame, before doing the same process to the needle.

“Hold an ice cube up to your earlobe, it'll help.”

Thorin is seriously starting to doubt this was ever even a good idea. Dwalin nudges him with his foot, “ _Come on_ .”

Oakenshield does as he's told for a few minutes. Dwalin then hands him a handkerchief swabbed in alcohol, “Clean your ear.”

“You all set?” Dwalin asks, hands close to Thorin's jaw. Thorin eyes the piercing needle and then pulls his head back.

“Wait.”

Dwalin smiles.

“ _How much_ will it hurt?”

“I don't _know,_ it depends on how well you can handle physical pain.”

“A lot? A little? Somewhere in the middle?”

Dwalin places the cork behind Thorin's earlobe and sighs, “I  _told you_ , I don't know.”

“Just. An estimate. Give me an estimate.”

Dwalin glances at him and Thorin continues, “I'm just saying. I'm nervous. And probably a little drunk, which is also why I'm doing this. Actually, you know what. I think I am  _absolutely_ drunk. And I shouldn't be doing this, at all, in fact, I think I--  _oh fucking shit, OW._ ”

“There, we're done.”

Thorin's right earlobe starts burning and he stares at Dwalin as Dwalin sits back on his haunches. Oakenshield shoots a hand up to touch but Dwalin bats it away, “You'll get it infected. Don't touch it for about a month, and remember to wash it.”

Thorin stares, dazed, at the wall. His head swims in his heartbeat, both loud and incessant. He's just gotten his ear pierced- this was beyond mere impulse, this was pure  _folly_ . When his father sees it-- oh, God, when his father  _sees it_ .

But he won't, because he won't wear it while he's at home. Keep it hidden, keep it locked away. Thorin smiles at his own stupidity.

_Why does he always say yes to Dwalin_ .

“You okay?” Dwalin asks, peering at him. It takes Thorin a few moments to snap himself back from the light-headedness.

“I don't know,” he admits, and his smile widens. He starts laughing, the same way Dwalin laughed when he told him he loved him, and the thought brings a new knot to his throat, new tears to his eyes.

_You're a fool, Thorin Oakenshield. And you should think before you speak_ .

“I have a lot of things I need to figure out right now,” Thorin says. It surprises him to think right afterwards that whether he loves Dwalin or not isn't one of them.

The answer is yes, he just doesn't have the courage to say it. Just yet. His ear burns and MacFundin wipes a trickle of blood from off Thorin's neck and then lets his hand rest on Thorin's shoulder. The smile Oakenshield gives Dwalin has no sarcasm, no nervousness, no malice. Dwalin looks at him as if he were the most beautiful thing in the world.

And to him, God forbid him, he is.

“I love you.” he says it again. It fills Dwalin's mouth with beauty, with golden rain and burning stars.

_I love you too_ , Thorin thinks. He closes his eyes when Dwalin leans in for the kiss.

I've gone mad, I've gone mad,  _I've gone mad_ .

(It doesn't matter).

 


	12. xi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for severe & graphic depiction of parental abuse, please please be careful.

The rumble of the car is as loud as Thorin's laughter, a snort as he throws his head back, a glint of metal in his right earlobe, Dwalin pressing his lips to the spot behind it.

They're sitting inside Dwalin's car, beers in their hands, heater going to keep them warm, far enough out of town to see the stars. It is three A.M.

“I don't want to go back to college,” Thorin whispers, once the smile dies down.

He says it very very quietly.

“I don't want you to go.”

Thorin smirks and feels the familiar (and when and how it became so familiar is such a wonder to him-- he's so different from the scared boy calling and never speaking a word, and yet he's exactly the same. Some lessons are hard to learn and deep down are never properly learned) weight of Dwalin's hand on his cheek. He leans into the touch, kisses Dwalin's palm.

“You have the earring to remember me by, now.”

But an earring doesn't have grey-blue eyes. An earring does not laugh as though the world is about to end and all joy is beauty, an earring does not arch an eyebrow and smirk, earrings can't kiss you, can't make you scream their name.

“It isn't the same.”

“It's all we have.” Dwalin says and then gives one of his smaller, bitterer smiles. He leans forward, catches Thorin's lips with a kiss and shifts his weight so he's somehow leaning over Thorin. He (almost) absent-mindedly slips tongue in and Thorin smiles when he does, grabs his mohawk and bites MacFundin's lower lip. Thorin purrs and smirks when he does so, Dwalin knocks one of their beers off the dashboard as he moves forward, one hand resting next to where the can was to hold himself up. The beer doesn't wet either of them but lands on the car floor and spills.

Thorin laughs.

“We won't fit,” he says, as Dwalin kisses his neck, hands already under his shirt, resting on his stomach.

“Don't care.”

“ _Dwalin_ ,” Thorin giggles, “we're _too tall_.”

He undoes Dwalin's belt and then Dwalin opens his, and Thorin's still giggling, even slightly breathless, Dwalin pulling Thorin's pants down. MacFundin pulls himself up and hits his head, loudly, against the car ceiling.

“Oh _shi_ \--” Thorin exclaims, before helping Dwalin finish wrestling out of his t-shirt. Thorin allows a hand to linger over Dwalin's chest as Dwalin unbuttons Thorin's flannel one, takes it off.

He hits his elbow on the stick shift as he slips Oakenshield's pants off completely, “Oh my _God_ ,” Thorin laughs and all Dwalin does is growl. When he pulls Thorin close to him, pants lowered, not entirely naked, Thorin hits his foot against the driver's seat and Dwalin hits his head against the ceiling again.

Thorin has to lean back and bury his face in his hands. The laughter starts in his stomach, “Dwalin, _we_ , _don't_ , _fit_ . Let's get home, all right let's get _home_ , you idiot,” Dwalin kisses his neck and his lips and Thorin's laughter grows, right leg stretched over the driver's seat, left leg sandwiched between Dwalin's hip and the radiator.

“Careful with the stick shift,” he mumbles, eyes still laughing, as Dwalin grabs his legs. Thorin tries to throw them over Dwalin's shoulders but there's no room to move, Dwalin already filling most of the space.

Thorin chuckles, “ _See_ , there's no _room_.”

“You're too pretty for me to wait 'till we get home.”

Dwalin pushes Thorin up a little so his neck's slightly leaning against the car door. He finds himself with Thorin's feet basically in his face, one hand slipped under Thorin's lower back to hold him up, the other hand splayed on the dashboard.

“You _can_ wait until we get _somewhere more comfortable_.”

The fact that he has to say this while peering between his own legs and erect penis just to look Dwalin in the face sends Thorin into another hysterical fit of giggles.

“Let's just-- let's just give it a try.” Dwalin smiles, unable to ignore the burn between his legs, the blue of the boy beneath him's eyes.

“It is _physically impossible_ , Dwalin, _Dwalin_!”

Thorin can't stop laughing, reaches up to grab Dwalin's neck to kiss him. Dwalin has to arch his back and nearly falls on top of Thorin, hand that was under him now firmly planted next to him. Dwalin's arm trembles with the effort of keeping himself up.

“Hold on,” Dwalin breathes and then moves Thorin's legs down, reaches down for his pants pocket. He pulls Thorin towards himself, “let's try it this way.”

Thorin has to lean forward as he scuttles over, nape of his neck against the car ceiling.

Dwalin finishes slipping the condom on, “C'mere,” he whispers and pulls Thorin up into his lap.

“ _Wait_!” but it's too late: Thorin's head hits the ceiling and Thorin jumps, “ _Ow_.”

“Are you all right?” Dwalin asks, concerned, holding Thorin's face.

“ _No_ , because there' _no room. To fuck_!” Oakenshield exasperatedly exclaims, grabbing Dwalin's hands and holding them.

“Let's just. Try.”

“You _cannot_ be _this_ horny. You cannot forsake all comfort for the sake of--”

“Your arse?”

Thorin frowns at him and Dwalin laughs softly and kisses him.

“Just. Just try lowering yourself onto me.”

“There's _no room_!”

“Oh for Chrissake, _Oakenshield_ \--”

Thorin wraps both arms around Dwalin's neck. He has to place a hand on the dashboard too and Dwalin quickly moves his to cover it, their fingers knotted. He guides himself to line up with Thorin, as Thorin tries to lift himself enough for this operation to successfully work. He finds himself having to arch his back.

He starts to giggle again.

Dwalin rolls his eyes and sighs, dropping his hand from Thorin's hip in exasperation, “I'm starting to go _flaccid_ , Thorin.”

Thorin snorts and covers his mouth with his hand, “I'm not the one who's _adamant_ in wanting to fuck in the _world's smallest car_.”

“Will you lower yourself on my goddamn dick or _do I have to do it for you_?”

Dwalin shifts his position slightly and Thorin loses his balance enough to hit his elbow on the dashboard.

“ _Shit_.”

And then he's laughing again.

Dwalin lets out an absolutely desperate sigh and then plants both hands on Thorin's hips, cranes his neck so that Thorin's and his nose are pressed together.

“What is it?” Thorin asks, blinking.

“You are _ridiculous_.”

Dwalin starts tickling him. Thorin pulls back,

“No, fuck, _Dwalin--_ Dwalin!”

Thorin tries to wriggle out of his grasp but there's no room, he manages to grab hold of Dwalin's hands but only briefly, “Fuck, Dwali-- Dwalin stop oh my God stop! _Stop stop stop_ \--”

Thorin laughs, eyes prickling with tears, and tries to move back but Dwalin grabs his hips, pulls him into a crushing hug, Thorin having to quickly place a hand to avoid hitting his head again. Dwalin kisses Thorin's chest, his neck his collarbones, butterfly kisses that turn Thorin's breathless laughter into small sighs.

“I want you,” Dwalin whispers, trailing his lips against Thorin's chest, a breath from his nipples.

“Really? _Really_ now?” Thorin asks, eyeing Dwalin, “I would've _never_ guessed.”

Dwalin quips an eyebrow, “It'd be hard not to want you.”

“Well that's just _great_ , but I'm fucking _stuck_ right now.”

Dwalin gapes at Thorin after the second it takes his brain to register the information.

He starts laughing, “Wait. _Stuck_?”

“In a _car this big_? I _know_ , who would've _ever guessed_.”

MacFundin has to bite his lip to avoid bursting into laughter in Thorin's face. Thorin sighs and raises both eyebrows at him.

“Okay. Okay. Just-- just try and move back.”

“What part of _I'm fucking stuck_ isn't clear, Dwalin?”

“Well _where_ are you stuck?”

“I'm stuck because both my legs are currently sandwiched between you and the _car_ , genius.”

Dwalin stops to think for a moment, “All right just--”

“ _Try and move back_?”

Dwalin narrows his eyes at Thorin, “Hold on.”

He opens the car door before Thorin can even say anything and pushes himself out from under Oakenshield. He lands ass-first on the freezing ground, “FUCK IT'S _COLD_ !” and Thorin screeches, “Oh my GOD, OH MY _GOD_ you idiot get back inside it's fucking _freezing_ , get back inside oh my _God_!” but he is laughing so hard he's having problems taking one breath after the other and in the meantime Dwalin quickly scurries to his feet, slips once on the ice and grabs the door, barefoot, hops back into the car and slams the door shut behind him. He stares at the windshield, and breathes through his mouth a few times.

“You are _insane_ ,” Thorin starts putting his clothes back on, “You are _out of your mind_ oh my God, oh my God.”

He has to stop getting clothed to lean his forehead against the dashboard and try to stop laughing.

“Of all. Of all the stupid-ass impulsive decisions I've ever taken that probably. That probably takes the cake, yeah.” Dwalin mumbles, glancing at Oakenshield out of the corner of his eye.

Thorin presses his forehead to Dwalin's temple and college and his father are so far from his mind he feels like he is an entirely different person, hands Dwalin his shirt.

He whispers, “I am so happy you are part of my life.”

He smiles, Dwalin's entire presence the feeling of his palm against his still bare hips.

He whispers, “I don't want to go home,” and means every word of it.

But he has to get up at six A.M. to get on a train and he knows he has to go home, he knows it-- but if he _could_ , if he _could_ , he wouldn't.

Home, after all, is where the heart is, and there is no heart where his father lives.

* * *

He's still laughing by the time Dwalin pulls up some feet away from the gates. Thorin finishes putting his scarf on and kisses him, bold, and smiles as Dwalin cups his face. MacFundin runs a thumb, lazy, along his lips.

“Write me,” Dwalin says, forehead to forehead, and Thorin nods and smiles.

“Will do.”

He slips out of the car and hums to himself, joy clinging to his skin like the cold. His shoes crunch against icing snow and he chuckles as he very quietly opens the front door. The key turning in the lock is enough to send his heartbeat running into the roof of his mouth: he waits for a moment, listens for movement he could never possibly hear from outside. The sky is an unnatural mass of clouds- too warm to snow but nevertheless smelling like it, and the first raindrops hit him the moment he creeps inside, slipping the shoes off to be quiet. Thorin slips his scarf off and warms his hands by blowing on them, rubbing them together. His nose drips.

At first, he doesn't notice the kitchen lights are on.

Thorin pitter patters across the living room, careful not to make any noise when he starts walking up the stairs and then,

 _and then_.

“Thorin?”

His father's voice is like rapiers through his much too tender flesh, flesh bleeding, flesh skinned by Dwalin's kisses, weak flesh, flesh he carries around like armour he's piece by piece losing along the way.

Thorin closes his eyes, and swallows. He turns.

Thrain isn't wearing his prosthetic eye-- he's carrying a glass of water, red silk dressing goun, hair unmade. It is strange to see his father like this-- _human_ , more than anything else, human and eye still clouded by sleep, but he quickly snaps out of it and the clouds burst, the ice returns. Blue into blue. Terror and rage.

“Thorin.”

Not a question but a _statement_ , and Thorin stares at the banister he's still clutching and narrows his eyes and tries not to cry in front of his father.

This was too good to last. _This was much too good to last_.

“What are you doing?”

An unnecessary question both know the answer to asked solely to tear him a bit more to pieces, Thorin swallowing and not answering, Thorin swallowing and feeling fresh tears where the other ones have already fallen.

“Thorin.”

Thorin shakes his head.

“ _Answer me_.”

“No.”

He clutches to his own fevered dreams like a child clutching a dying parent's hand- _oh this metaphor brings him back much too back_ , and then Thrain's marching over.

His free hand grabs Thorin's chin and forces him to look up. Thorin who closes his eyes and swallows.

“ _Look at me_.”

He opens his eyes because he is a dog trained into obedience and lets out a shaky, terrified breath and then his father's gaze falls to the side, because metal has caught the glint of what little light there is in the semidarkness and Thorin may be seventeen but right now he feels smaller than seven and so _scared_ so scared oh God so _terrified_ , so shaking bloody terrified--

“ _What's this_?” Thrain snarls, forces his son's head to the side so he can take a better look.

Thorin stares at the wall.

People like him do not deserve happines no matter what lies they are told.

“Is this-- is this an _earring_ , Thorin?”

The breath that becomes a sob and sometimes in his madness he forgets his father is a force of nature is a forest fire is a flash flood destroying everything in his path and he wants to vomit, all of a sudden wants to vomit and then Thrain is putting the glass down grabbing his son by the shoulder (he could fight back if he wanted to but there is no point, no point, _no point at all_ ) dragging him up the stairs, the lights in his office go on, Thorin's pushed in, the door is slammed shut behind him.

“Are you one of those _faggots_ , son?”

The word spat out as Thorin tries to calm his shaking hands, “No,” he lies, “no, _no_ \--”

“Then where were you? What were you _doing_ , Thorin? Why the _fuck_ are you wearing an earring?”

This is a dream and he will wake _this is a dream and he will wake this is nothing but a dream and he will wake_ , only he _won't_ , and Thorin chokes down the tears and whines.

“ _Answer me_.”

“I'm _sorry_.”

“Answer me. Are you a _pervert_ , Thorin? Do you let the boys _fuck you_?”

The vulgarity makes him shiver, “ _Stop_ ,” Thorin begs, not looking up, “please stop.”

“ _Take it off_. Was it Dwalin? Have you been going out with _Dwalin_?”

“I'm not _gay_ ,” Thorin exclaims and it doesn't matter anymore if he wakes his siblings, “I swear I'm not. _Please_.”

Thrain buries his nails in his cheek and then lets go. Thorin is shaking so hard he can see it.

“Take it _off_ ,” Thrain snarls. Thorin brings both his fists to his mouth. Thrain raises a hand and Thorin flinches before anything happens.

“Take it _off_ ,” Thrain repeats. He marches past his son and around his desk. He takes the wastebin and presents Thorin with it, “Take it off, and throw it out.”

Thorin wants to die. He wants to die. He wants to die he wants it to _end_ oh he never deserved a _moment_ of happiness, he wants it to end--

He stares at the crumpled papers and although the sobs do not calm, he slips the earring off and throws it out.

Thrain drops the basket again.

“ _No son of mine_ is a sissy. _Understood_?”

Thorin nods because there is nothing else he can do.

“Now get _out of my sight_.”

Thorin walks backwards until his back hits the door and then he opens it. His knees give out as he shuts it, and he grabs onto the wall to stand, nails burning, he drags himself through the hallway, into the bathroom.

Knees against tiles vomit hitting the floor, hitting the toilet seat, he empties his already empty stomach into the toilet and for a moment hopes the tears and the bile will both choke him to death.

Thorin's mind is no longer with him.

He vomits until his throat his dry.

He vomits until he is screaming and dry heaving and then he whines, once, twice, terror devouring him, and he stands and flushes the toilet and cleans the floor and rinses his face.

The next thing he knows is he's running through the garden without a coat on, shoes barely tied- he can't remember walking downstairs.

The next thing he knows is he's mad, going mad, and he vaguely knows where he's heading 'cause he'd been there a few times before, and he's running because there's nothing else he can do, he's running because or else he knows he'll kill himself.

* * *

“...either way, _you shouldn't be up_.”

“Oh, nonsense. I'm the eldest, I decide my own bedtime.”

Balin smiles at his brother from over the pile of paperwork, “Besides, you're here earlier than I thought. I was expecting you at the crack of dawn.”

Dwalin shrugs and sips the coffee Balin's just finished making them, “The boy I was with was... busy tomorrow. He had to be home early.”

“ _Oh_.”

Balin nods and smirks, eyebrow arched. Dwalin eyes him, “ _...what_?”

“Oh, nothing.” his older brother chuckles, going back to his work. There's a quaint smile on his lips Dwalin can't really place, the youngest plays with a letter opener and then asks, “What's so fun--”

There's the sound of someone slamming their fist against the door. Thunder chases the clouds outside soon afterwards, and Dwalin looks definitely puzzled.

“Who in the name of God is-” but his voice dies short when he opens the door and sees Thorin in front of him, shaking, wearing nothing but a shirt, soaking wet, his face unmistakably twisted by sobs despite the rain.

Dwalin glances behind him and quickly shuts the door, leaves it slightly ajar, “What _are you doing he-_ ”

and then he notices the bruising that's starting to show where Thrain grabbed Thorin. Dwalin's jaw spasms, clenches,

“Thorin, _what happened_?”

“I can't do this anymore.” Thorin whispers, voice hacked in pieces by his fear, and before Dwalin can understand what's happening he's stepping back and starting to run away again.

“ _What the fuck_ \-- Thorin. _Thorin_!”

And Dwalin's rushing after him even before he's done cursing under his breath.

“Thorin!”

But the boy stops only when Dwalin grabs his wrist and turns him, “Thorin--”

“ _No_ , please, please, don't do this, we should _end this_ , Dwalin-”

Balin opens the door and stares at them from afar. He hugs himself, lips drawn tight together.

“What did he do to you, Thorin?”

“Nothing that I didn't _deserve_ , Dwalin, Dwalin, _please let me go_ \--”

But Dwalin's grabbing Thorin's neck and staring him dead in the eye, “What did he _do_?”

Thorin pushes Dwalin away and steps back, “Nothing, nothing, Dwalin, _please_ _please please_.”

“Look at me, _look at me_.”

Dwalin's holding Thorin's face and Thorin's grabbing his wrists out of instinct more than anything, _God his eyes are blue_ , Dwalin thinks. _God his eyes are scared_ , and the rage is as white as it is hot, straming, screaming.

“He _can't hurt you_ , Thorin I'm here, I'm _here_ , he can't hurt you.”

“ _No, please, please_ \--”

And Thorin's leaning over and _keening_ , the roar of the rain and Dwalin's voice and his father's voice _his father's voice_ the only things he can hear, the cars driving past. Thorin's crying so hard his chest hurts, his throat burns. Dwalin follows the movement, stops him before he kneels in the slush on the floor.

“I'm _here_ , Thorin. I'm here.”

In the end they're both on their knees. Thorin keeps on shaking his head, rain matting his hair to his forehead, and he's crying without even moving. He's not even sobbing: all he does is moan, a single sound repeated. He clings to Dwalin.

Dwalin holds him and buries him in his arms and cradles him, and Thorin stares at the street behind MacFundin and it is empty, stares at the house with its lights on, stares at his father who isn't really there but _it doesn't matter_ , it doesn't matter, he is always there, he always carries Thrain inside him, he always will, always will.

God he wants to _die_.

“I'm right _here_ , baby,” Dwalin whispers, cheek to Thorin's forehead, “I'm right here, I'm right _here_ , he can't hurt you, I won't let him hurt you.”

Lips to his forehead that Thorin doesn't have the strength to push away, “ _I won't let him hurt you_.”

* * *

Balin stares at Dwalin who's staring into space, Thorin's head in his lap. The rain outside still roars on.

The two boys are wrapped in a blanket, Thorin's shoulders rising and falling with the quiet rhythm of a shallow sleep.

Balin sighs.

Dwalin looks up at him and Balin tuts, shakes his head.

Thorin's wearing one of Dwalin's shirts, he's clutching Dwalin's hand with the desperation of a boy who's having nightmares. Balin looks at him and feels his heart flood with pity. With sadness.

“Dwalin, _God_ , Dwalin.” Balin whispers, walking up to them, letting his gaze trail off into the lit fireplace.

“Of all... _of all the people_ you could have fallen in love with, _it had to be him_?”

Dwalin blinks and stares at Thorin, brushes the hair out of his furrowed brow. His smile is bitter, and small. Thorin sniffles in his sleep.

“You act like he gave me a _choice_ , Balin.”

Balin stares at his brother and then shakes his head, Dwalin traces with a finger the small curve of dents where Thrain buried his nails in his son's cheek.

 _If I could I'd tear the bastard apart_ he thinks to himself. Instead he simply rests his hand on Thorin's back, “You act like I had _any_ say in it.”

And he didn't-- those eyes caught him off guard, swept him off his feet. That laughter, that smile.

 _I never want to see you cry again_ , Dwalin thinks with the fierceness only love can bring. He will bleed himself dry if he has to, he decides then and there. He will lay himself down and _die_ , if it means making him happy.

“Neither of you are _legal_ , Jesus, Dwalin.”

“I know.”

Nineteen and seventeen- two and three years too young.

Balin turns towards his brother and the boy sleeping in his arms, “If his father _ever_ finds out--”

“He won't.”

Balin knots his fingers together and brings them up against his mouth, “ _This..._ this isn't one of your punk boys, this isn't a neo-nazi you can just _beat up_ , Dwalin, Dwalin this is _so much bigger_ than you.”

So much bigger than both of them, yes, but it was ever since it began. Two hearts are too small to hold such a storm in: it is inevitable that it will explode and drag the world to flame with it. Dwalin combs through Thorin's hair with his fingers and smirks.

“I know.”

“You _don't_. You don't _know_ his father, Dwalin, you don't _know_ what Thrain is capable of.”

Dwalin looks up and looks at Balin as if he were a man condemned to death.

“But I love him, Balin. There's nothing I can do about it.”

Balin sighs and lets his hands drop to his side, he inhales, deeply, exhales. He doesn't answer his brother, doesn't want a _part_ in this madness. This will hurt. This will hurt them all beyond any and all measure, this will all drag them to hell. Balin looks at Thorin sleeping in his brother's lap and wishes he could keep both of them safe.

He glances at his wristwatch. It's nearly five A.M.

The eldest MacFundin sibling sighs.

“Wake him up, Dwals. He needs to get home.”

Dwalin's eyes harden the moment Balin speaks. He quickly stands, props Thorin's head against a pillow and strides up to his brother. He keeps his voice low as to not wake Thorin, and hisses:

“ _What_?”

Thorin opens his eyes and stares at the two. He swallows, his head throbbing, his throat dry. Neither of them notice he's awake.

“Wake him up, he needs to get home.”

“He's not going back there.”

“Do _not_ make this any more complicated than it already is.”

“Balin, Balin you _saw_ what he did to him--”

“I _know_. And he will do _so much worse_ if he doesn't go home. He leaves for college _today_.”

“ _Balin_ \--”

“I'll go.”

Dwalin turns around: Thorin's sitting, the blanket around his shoulders. He nods, “It's okay. I'll go.”

“ _Thorin_.” Dwalin whispers, his gaze softening. There is so much worry in his voice Thorin can barely stand it.

_You're hurting him._

_You'll always hurt him_.

Thorin glances at Balin, and Balin glances back. He doesn't attempt to smile: there would be no use in reassurance, no matter how genuine.

“I'll go home. It's the right thing to do.”

“I'll drive you.”

“No, Dwalin.”

Thorin cannot shake Thrain's voice hissing the Scottish boy's name off of his shoulders. Dwalin blinks at him and then lights himself a cigarette. It is enough to keep him occupied, to keep his rage down. His hands shake only once.

“No smoking in the house,” Balin whispers, exhausted.

“ _Fuck off_ ,” Dwalin snarls. Balin's shoulders tighten as Thorin stands and folds the blanket. He is so _precise_ it is so clear how terrified he is. It takes him five minutes to finish and Dwalin spends those whole five minutes staring intently at the floor. He is seething with anger at Balin, foolish impulsive anger, deeper anger that courses through his veins at the thought of Thrain. He could kill him right now. _Swear to God_ , he could murder the man.

“I'm sorry, laddie.” Balin whispers. Thorin shrugs a much too adult shrug. He gives Dwalin's shoulder a squeeze, his head spinning with exhaustion.

He doesn't want to go home. He _cannot_ go home, not like this, not like _this_.

“You took the earring out,” Dwalin murmurs.

Thorin stares at him and his eyes are shining, lucid, pools shattering deep within. He opens his mouth to reply and no sound comes out: he simply gapes, the pain in his chest a crushing prison. He feels not at all like himself: like there is a person screaming inside him, and his flesh is nothing but the prison this person is trapped in. Balin watches the two and feels like an axeman. He swallows down the feeling.

Oh, you _foolish children_. You stupid, stupid little boys.

They are playing with fire and their fingertips are already burnt clear off to the bone: he hopes they will notice before it burns their hands off completely. He hopes, he hopes. He _prays_.

“Thorin, we need to go.”

Dwalin stares at the floor and wants to run after them even after the door slams closed. Dwalin stares at the floor, dirties the rug with his cigarette ash, drops the stub in Balin's now cold mug of coffee. He lights himself another one and then grabs the chair his brother was using and _screams_ when he throws it against the wall.

“ _FUCK_!”

A framed picture of his mother comes loose and falls to the ground: the glass shatters and Dwalin's hands are full of splinters, there's a dent in the wall's plaster, the chair's broken. He kicks it, and wishes he could break it again, and again, and again.

He wipes his tears with the back of his hand.

 _I never want to see you cry ever again_.

* * *

His father is standing in the entryway, Thorin's already packed bags at his feet.

Balin parks the car, gives the boy's shoulder a squeeze. Thorin seems to disappear in Balin's tweed jacket. He swallows.

“I don't think I can do this.”

“You have to.”

 _Turn back_ , a voice in Balin's head tells him, _turn back and bring him to your home and set him up on the couch and keep him far from his madman of a father. Turn back and **save him** , turn back and do what's right_.

Balin sighs, “Come on, lad.”

Thorin twists his mouth to the side in a grimace, “I'm sorry I pulled such a scene.” he murmurs.

 _Don't apologise for this. Please, please, please. It is not your fault_.

“You did nothing wrong, Thorin.”

Thorin throws back his head but the laugh that comes out is the smallest, smallest sound, nearly intelligible. The bitterness coats it and makes it heavy, though, makes it clunk against the car that still smells of spilled beer.

Thorin steps out and Thrain's eyes are narrow slits in a stoic, cold face.

“Go get the last of your things in your room,” he snarls. In the few moments it takes for Balin to come up to him, Thrain snarls at his son, his back to him, his voice low so only Thorin can hear,

“You are _never_ seeing Balin's brother again. Am I clear? You are _never_ seeing that boy again.”

Thorin swallows and his breath is cold in his lungs. He nods and bows his head, uncertain whether he is lying or not when he says, “I know.”

But in truth all he knows is that when he goes up to his room and catches a glimpse of Frerin staring at him from behind his ajar door (his little brother smiles with a smile that tells of understanding, of knowing how this is) Thorin stops by his father's study first.

His heart beats too hard and his hands sweat too much, but he digs through thrown out documents and pencil shavings listening to Balin talk to Thrain downstairs until he finds a small gold ring.

He doesn't wear it, of course, but when he walks downstairs the weight in his heart is a little lighter, and his pocket is a little heavier with a secret, small enough to fit inside a box, small enough to cover with a hand, small enough to keep safe, only theirs, _only theirs_.

Thorin says goodbye to his siblings, and to Balin and as he waits for the taxi he thumbs the earring and he thinks he is losing. He is losing and winning at the same time, defying his father's orders, he is running head-first into disaster.

He lowers his head.

His father does not say goodbye to him.


	13. xii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a million apologies for this being so late, & i promise i'll try and do better next time. thank you so much for reading this and thank you to those who are always there, read every update and keep me going with their neverending support. i do not deserve wonderful readers such as you, and yet i still manage to have you.  
> thank you so much, for your kindness, your passion and, most importantly, for your patience.

The dinner table is awful quiet.

Dwalin pushes potatoes around his plate with his fork, scowling all the while. Balin eyes him with a gaze that betrays weariness, and exhaustion and, deep down, maybe even guilt. He stares at his brother's hands and sees them only bruised, covered in blood, the knuckles torn where he'd gotten into yet another fist fight.

“You haven't touched your food.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Dwals-”

“I said. I'm not. Hungry.”

Dwalin clenches his jaw at his brother but Balin breaks eye contact almost immediately: Dwalin's eyes are burning cesspools of betrayal and rage and frustration and the disappointment, quiet, that has been sitting at the bottom of his throat for quite some time-- there is so much anger in his little brother's eyes, bitterness, unspoken accusations. There is a coil around Dwalin's neck, beneath his Adam's apple, a hangman's noose that every thought of Thorin tightens and makes breathing harder. Dwalin pushes his plate away from himself.

Balin swallows, glances up at the photograph of their mother and its shiny new frame. He sighs, sets his fork down, quietly lets his shoulders sag. He stares at his glass and at his plate and at the tablecloth: anything but Dwalin. Anything but those eyes, their strength, the way they burn like plane upon plane upon plane of sun-baked, sun-torn grass dry and set ablaze by summer.

So it's summer, so it's _suicide_ , so they're drowning at the bottom of the pool.

Balin stares at nothing and the exhaustion takes him, that of an old man who's seen too much and he's not even forty yet, but it burns it hurts it screams, he thinks of the rain and the storm, of blue scared eyes, of hands shaking of bodies pressed together in the darkness. He thinks of seeing Thorin's knees give out and of the boy falling to the ground and of Dwalin catching him and their foreheads touching in Thorin's juvenile, exploding panic and the sudden shrill notion of being nothing but a _trespasser_ , a man seeing too much, a boy watching through the temple windows as the sacred rites are seen through with. He had looked away, at a certain point, the awareness of being witness to things not his poignant, sharp like the rage in Dwalin's veins right now, suffocating in different ways, in the way a man realizes he will never truly understand his brother and he must come at peace with things as they are, and limit the damage, protect where he can and must. Balin does not belong to their world. Balin never belonged to Dwalin's world, even though he tries, he tried, he is still trying to.

“ _Dwalin_ ,” Balin murmurs, like an admission of failure, like the last word of a prayer, like a whisper, like the rain against glass, like balm trying to soothe a burn, like cold water trying to keep down his brother's mounting desperation.

Dwalin doesn't look up and tightens his grip on his fork.

“If I could have done something, I would have.”

But Dwalin scoffs, and shakes his head.

“No, _no_. You wouldn't have. Because you're a coward.”

Dwalin pushes himself away from the table, chair scraping against the floor, throws his napkin like a man throwing white cloth in defeat, stands.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Dwalin grabs his leather jacket and rams an unlit cigarette between his teeth.

“You haven't slept home in the last three weeks.”

“That's none of your business.”

Balin stands too, then, but lacks all the briskness and the anger and the hurt. He sighs, and is quiet in the storm that suddenly creates itself between them, burns a path between brother and brother. _He loves him and you took him from him_.

“Dwalin,” and he looks his little brother in the eye and prays the youngest will not break this contact because he knows that whatever he can convey in these few precious seconds is all he will be able to tell him, to _show_ him, and “I did the only thing that could be done.”

Dwalin stops before the door and shrugs and turns and his voice creaks under the weight of his pain (loss this young is something hearts are unaccustomed to in the darkest, deepest ways. A broken heart, you _stupid idiot_ , you've gone and got your heart broken like the lovesick fool you are. _Hardcore my arse_ ).

“No. _No_. You did the _easiest_ thing you could do.”

And now Dwalin turns fully to face him again and his hands are shaking only he'll never show it, grabs the cigarette from out between his lips catches it between index and middle finger, and raises his voice because against this it is the only weapon he has,

“You saw! You _saw_ what he _did to him_! You SAW WHAT HE WAS LIKE!”

saw him crying saw him sobbing saw him curling up within himself like broken coils of a spine grasping for straws where there are none, saw him so utterly powerless, saw him a terrified child saw him _alone_.

“So don't you _dare_ say what you did was the only thing you could do. My brother doesn't abandon a boy and call it _right_.”

“ _I never said it was RIGHT_!”

It is as quick as a summer hailstorm and just as devastating: Balin's eyes darken, and his voice rises, and then it falls like a wind or the waves into the ring of his only scream, and then his jaw comes loose again, his eyes come light again, he sighs. Dwalin looks at his hands and they are dirty with blood, all of their lives are dirty with blood, sins and tragedies and the eyes of a boy who does not want to go home and will die if he does so, but there is also absence falling within absence, the need to write the story again from the start and erase the mistakes, watch the right words as they engulf the wrong ones on the page and make this correct, make them _calm_ , make them sane, chase away the emptiness, the bitterness beneath his tongue of Thorin's hands not being there to hold his as they shake. He needs him uncomfortably deep, and it scares him.

Dwalin stares at his brother.

He does not look back when he slams the door behind himself.

* * *

He floats through the first month of school like a ghost, feet barely touching the ground, and every breath is a jump and every thought a flinch.

Classes are a dazed amalgam of colours and sounds, meals are just endless quiet: food barely touched, food pushed around a plate, food felt like a rock at the bottom of his body. He feels bloated like rocks in his throat, endlessly growing in size, the feeling of taint under his skin that comes and goes. Exactly ten days spent leeching off Dwalin as if he were salvation unfindable found in the crack of tattooed skin nothing but a praying man's answer, vellum upon which he'd traced invocations to a body beautiful a body broken, Dwalin's and his, with love like ink with kisses and hands stained with himself and maybe his madness. Hallelujah of the holiest kind torn from chapped lips, smiles tumbling followed by laughter, _oh_ , for a moment he tricked himself into believing he was holy too, as holy as the boy above him, inside him, against him.

Thorin staresat the rain out his window and feels his hands burning, the sadness on his chest uncomfortably thick. Someone opens the door to the room and Thorin's quick enough to snatch a book from the table and bury his nose in it. It is, blissfully, upright.

John, a year his junior clears his throat, “We're going out, wanna come?”

Before the notion of his own voice even has the time to be aware of the existence of words being spoken at all he peers over the book and shakes his head, “No. No.”

John arches an eyebrow and shrugs, “Whatever.”

Thorin starts breathing again only when he hears the door close, and the words in front of him are blurry and meaningless and worthless to his time that trickles down his thoughts like empty cicada shells. He leans back against the chair and sighs and closes the book, stares at the rain that sours his mood and dampens his thoughts. He finds it difficult, unbearable, to admit to himself that he misses Dwalin, that _any_ of this sticky heavy (different) sadness stems from _missing_ the boy and the revery, the absolute wonder with which he would hold Thorin, whisper his name like song against his lips with lopsided grins and butterfly kisses, against his neck face buried in his moans with needy gasps and hands pinning wrists over Thorin's head, with laughter and shining eyes and pictures taken on old cameras that scream “ _I love you_.” as they're shaken to show their images concealed.

And he feels all this, this weight, on him and it tears him bit by bit and stops his footsteps before they even happen: Thorin buries his face in his hands, throat constricting as the sadness begins to bury him, shovels dirt into an open grave where Thorin is trapped and trying to escape, nails breaking as he claws against crumbling dirt that falls into his eyes and settles like thicker dust in his lungs, suffocating. The voice, the accented roughness the rounded r's the gruff laugher, heavy warm and safe like his hands (knuckles ridged like mountains across the back, palms rough and fingers thick with work, oil stained, sometimes, sometimes leaving smudges on Thorin's face when he'd kiss him) and he feels like such a _fool_ , like a holy man damned for Hell quivering in the need of the lick of flame against idle sickly flesh, because there is the world with all its fragile certainties and then there's _Dwalin_ , who in his chaos is the sanest thing he's ever found.

He is holy, holy, Christ on the Cross nailed by his own sins, holy in the eyes of Antichrist, holy in the eyes of his very own Messiah, and Thorin is his own Judas, and the world is a funny borken mechanism between whose gears he's broken his fingers once too many, and now he cannot go a day without the endorphins that come from bones shattering and nails bleeding as they're torn.

Thorin stares at the book, and then at the space right above the book, and then at the pen and the paper to his right, and he thinks-- he thinks _you're a fool_.

And he thinks _I have their address and their phone number and I could. I could. I could._

And he tells himself _If worse comes to worst, he'll never answer_.

* * *

Dwalin wipes his face with a rag and leans back.

The boiler stares at him, motionless, emotionless, quiet. He taps against it with his wrench and it doesn't even rattle.

“Shit,” Dwalin mumbles not entirely convinced of his own disappointment, and stands up. He stretches his back and feels the weight at the mouth of his stomach grow heavy for no reason at all, except all of them, everything, always it seems, like a toxic cloud or a weight to his ankles or an illness hatched in fever and sweat under his skin, and he swallows, and the pit loosens a few stones through his chest. He burns, and wishes he did not have to.

There's footsteps over his head and in the quiet loneliness of the basement's boiler room he thinks they may belong to Thrain: his hands suddenly itch with the need to punch something, but the tips of Thorin's fingers ghost along his ribcage and his lips along his jaw calm the boil in his chest. Dwalin grabs the thoughts and chases them away, and it would be all the same as a few months before save that he's staring at a boiler instead of his new room but the stuff and the substance and the dreams of his body are the same, only that perhaps for once there is a concrete beast to fuel anger at, and it's the owner of the house he's standing in, the father of the boy he thinks he loves and oh, Dwalin is _jealous_ of Thrain's ownership on Thorin's dreams, to the very core he wishes he could break the chains and turn the clock back and _change things_ and keep Thorin safe, always, always, always.

Dwalin misses the boy as if he were drowning and clawing at water for nothing and yet his hands have been blessed, now, the stuff may be the same but it is _brighter_ \-- lips that greet them and kiss them, fingers slipping between Thorin's teeth. He has touched the holiest fractures of that little boy's scared soul and he has seen them taken from him over and over again by the man whose boiler he's trying to fix at the moment.

Dwalin closes his eyes and curses under his breath.

The door opens, then, as is the natural progression in an endless chain of chaos, and there are quick rickety steps down the stairs, the clanging of someone trying to free himself of a father's poison voice and quick breathing, hands shaking, skin clammy glasses nearly falling off the bridge of a nose.

Dwalin turns and finds himself face to face with surprised blue eyes behind thick lenses. 

Frerin's gaze floats frantically across Dwalin's face, skyroceting between the broken bridge of his nose and his scar and finally settling for a nondescript spot somewhere beneath Dwalin's left earring.

"Oh."

"Hello."

"I'm. Sorry. Sorry. I didn't think anyone would be here."

Frerin wonders if he should fight the revulsion he feels at the idea of having to set his pupils into Dwalin's and have to force himself to follow them throughout whatever conversation they are about to have, heavy weights tied to his wrists that will make it hard to remember what he wants to say as he gasps for air in the bubble of water within, as endless as his hands searching for comfort within each other's palms for good, textures that boil through the fabric of his world in elusive gallopings through fields of sharp breaths taken to calm thoughts much too breakable for comfort.

And that is, after all, what he was wired to do: of fathers and running and running, two boys and a girl blessed by blue broken bones set in the middle of ashen skulls.

Frerin stares from the earring to the floor and waits for the word-blow like one waits for axe to fall to back of neck: with small chests and small hearts and a mind so big it does not know how to hold the world within itself with ease, a mind that holds things like stepping off cliffs into waters of textured words and thick thoughts coloured and concepts shown through images as bright and complex as the sun.

Frerin despises it.

Dwalin furrows his brow briefly at this boy with this mop of curls of his and the quick darting eyes that never stop in one spot, always trip and fall and curl through the air like song.

Blue.

Goddammit, blue. Like his but  _different_ , Christ-- different?

And yet-- as they stare at the side of Dwalin's face there is within them a sadness he knows by heart.

"You all right there, kid?"

Only that Frerin's eyes do not snap to meet his and when Dwalin speaks he flinches very very slightly and tenses his body to hide it. There is no step backwards but Dwalin almost expects one: it's too similar to how he used to flinch when his father raised his voice, always expecting the blow that inevitably followed. The thing that suddenly wakes his blood into loud roaring screams of million voices merging into one another (as if the heat, the blind absolute rage he feels for Thrain Oakenshield could grow even more than it already has- but this after all is the beginning, not that he could know, not that you can escape one person's poison when it spreads with terrible ease) though, is the fact that he has  _not_ raised his voice.

Frerin's breath unclenches from inside his chest when no forceful fingers push his chin up to make him make eye contact.

He curls and uncurls his fists in his pockets and rubs a loose thread between index and thumb, not the same as burying it in raw rice or beans but at least there is one thing in his brain and not a million, there is a thread, there are not a hundred whispers impossible to understand.

The pipes behind Dwalin rattle and Frerin thanks them for answering in his stead, only they haven't, because it's a texture but not  _his_ texture, and he knows he has to fill the empty space left in the air for his answer.

"All good. All fine."

Dwalin quirks an eyebrow and is sensible enough now to the rumbling beneath Thorin's skin to know Frerin is lying-- but Frerin isn't Thorin and Dwalin knows he does not have permission to ask anything. Nonetheless, the flinch begins to gnaw at him almost instantly, in the deep scary ways things that are dear to his heart do: it settles inside his brain, and he makes a mental note to ask Thorin about it.

 _If you ever see him again_.

 _If he'll ever allow you to come close again_.

"Frerin?" a voice calls at the door at the top of the stairs. The door rings loudly as metal crashes against metal when it is shut again. Frerin flinches a second time and Dwalin wonders how loud the sound must be in his head.

Dis' bare feet come into view a few moments before she does. She's not as tall as her brothers (and Frerin isn't  _by far_ as tall as Thorin) but she's tall for a girl her age and now she almost seems to know it, how she awkwardly folds herself around her body like her brothers do and lets her shoulders slump forward slightly. When Thrain looks at her he sees a daughter becoming a woman and does not know how to react, and knows he must protect her, still horribly aware he does not have the knowledge to help her, he is too stunted, too wrapped in his grief.

In the years to come, this will bring her close to horror deepest, darkest, most terrible.

She stops in her tracks, surprised when she sees Dwalin, and lowers her gaze for a moment, for a moment she blushes. 

"Frer?"

The boy shakes his head and the relief on his face at hearing his sister's voice is palpable, clear as day: his shoulders seem to liquify, his back falls, his neck uncoils. His eyes fret away from Dwalin's face, and he turns to his sister. 

Frerin's hands fall through the air in quick brisk movements, and his voice sings in celebration at no longer having to be used. He needs respire from its echoing, needs to simply feel the world as it is, through his hands, and his palms, and the words he signs quickly and able. Dis replies likewise before looking up at Dwalin,

"Dad asks if the boiler's fixed."

The machine moans behind MacFundin and he glances at it, "Is that enough of an answer, lass?"

He's smiling, and Dis finds herself unable to handle the greys in his eyes, but still, she smiles back, and brushes hair behind her ear. If Frerin shoots her a knowing, teasing gaze she simply ignores it.

"Yes. And. And thank you."

Dwalin tips his head, and knows it is his time to leave. Frerin needs his space, whatever has been done to him, and Dis needs to wait on the shore as he swims towards the deepest, darkest part of the ocean, as he lets his body fall underwater into the deep, as he lets the light trickle away through the waves overhead, and the coldness and the depth and the darkness cradle him. Dis waits, patiently, and knows he will come home when he is ready.

Dwalin thinks about this, as he pockets the money Thrain (with a scowl on his face) hands him and lights himself a cigarette once he's in his car (still yellow, still trudging along) and he shakes his head, and he thinks, for a moment, that he may be foolish enough to be able to save them.

(He has forgotten, just as easily, the lessons he taught himself: boys with sadness in their eyes cannot be saved. And neither can their families).

* * *

 "How'd it go?" Balin asks, not looking up from the accounting records he's working on.

Dwalin shrugs as he walks by, slice of bread and cheese between his teeth and a mug of coffee in his hands.

"Okay," he mutters. Balin glances up at him, "Before you go up, you've got mail."

"Is it mum?" Dwalin stops halfway up the stairs.

"It's from  _Eton College_ in  _Berkshire_." Balin dryly says, an eyebrow quirked so similarly to Dwalin's, as he holds up an envelope. Dwalin stares at it for a moment and his thoughts race over each other. He blinks at Balin, then at the letter again, and his heart does  _something_ and he's not even sure what it is, only it seems to break and rearrange itself and as it does so find respite in his mouth.

He zooms back down the stairs and grabs the letter out of Balin's grasp with his free hand, rushing back upstairs without even saying a word. He's smiling, and Balin looks at his nineteen year old brother the way one looks at something confusing and conflicting, that mixes happiness and wariness, fear and quiet discomfort. He does not want Dwalin to get hurt.

He prays to God he will not have to be the one to pick up the pieces-- and yet he knows Thorin needs the mending, needs the steady hands to stop the shaking, needs the simple love and comfort, and he is torn between the potential harm and the potential good. Balin sighs, shrugs and shakes his head, and goes back to his calculator.

Dwalin nearly spills the coffee as he sets his mug down and nearly rips the letter as he tries to open the envelope. When he manages to a single precious page spills out, careful handwriting dotted by lines drawn over words too honest, or too dry, or simply not right.

It starts with  _Dear Dwalin_ , no mistaking it, and the boy it is foe feels as if he is human again just by reading two words.

> _Dear Dwalin_ ,
> 
> ~~_How are y_ ~~
> 
> ~~_How_ ~~
> 
> _I don't really do letters. I'm not used to them, I guess. They're like a diary, only there's someone else on the other side. It's scary, I guess. Less scary though when it's with you. You make a lot less scary._
> 
> _I'm sorry. First off. I'm really, really sorry: for the silence, and the scene I made when ~~Thrain~~ Father got mad at me, and. ~~Shit~~. I'm sorry._
> 
> _How are you? I'm all right, I guess. As I said, I'm not used to writing letters ~~but I'm too scared to call~~ but I don't know how Balin'd react if I called. ~~I didn't think he knew about us and I guess having him know makes me nerv~~   ~~I don't know how he feels about thi~~ I didn't want to be a bother, didn't know when I could call. I don't think I'll even reread this letter, so I guess I should add "I'm sorry for all the mistakes that'll be in here" to the list above. _
> 
> _So. You still hanging out in that house in Soho?_
> 
> ~~_I mi_ ~~
> 
> ~~_I_ ~~
> 
> ~~_I miss_ ~~
> 
> _I miss you._
> 
> _You can not answer, I'll understand, it's okay. I know it may be stupid of me to send this but it's raining outside ~~and I feel lonely~~ ~~and I keep thinking ab~~ ~~and I don't feel at home anymore if I'm not with you~~ and I guess I felt like writing you a letter. I still think about you a lot_.
> 
> ~~_Love_ ~~
> 
> _All the best,  
>  Thorin_


	14. xiii

_Dear Thorin,_

_I can't believe this. I can't believe you'd write. I thought I'd lost you, for good. There're so many things I want to tell you. How are you? Are you well? How do you feel? How's school? I miss you._

_~~Jesus I c~~  I can't stop thinking about you, your hands and your smile and your eyes. When are you coming home? _

_And yes, I've still been hanging out in that house in Soho, things without you to calm me are just too difficult at home._

_I miss you. I **miss you** . _

_Love, Dwalin._

* * *

_Dear Dwalin,_

_School is tiresome and hectic, as always. Getting ready for my A Levels is daunting and stressful to say the least, and terrifying to say the worst. I'm ~~all~~  okay, for the most part.  ~~Dad wan~~  Father wants good results, and I'm trying to get them for him.  ~~I feel like I need to~~ . It's mostly working, although thoughts about you do tend to distract me a lot. _

_Honestly I didn't think you'd reply. So thank you for replying. It's been raining here for a couple of weeks and I feel lonely. But you wrote back, so it's better._

_Say hi to Balin for me,_

_Thorin._

* * *

_Thorin,_

_God, even ~~your name,~~ ~~**your name** ~~  reading your name makes my heart race and seeing my name written by you is indescribable. I feel like I could kiss you until the world ends. I  **want**  to kiss you until the world ends. _

_~~What's~~  How's your week been? I've found a job, I think. A friend of a friend needs a favor (nothing illegal) and I'm apparently the perfect guy for the job: moving crates around the back of a shop  ~~migh~~  isn't really glamorous but it's better than nothing, it pays all right and I no longer feel like I'm leeching off Balin. _

_Don't feel like you owe your father anything, though. Never feel like that, please. You don't owe him your happiness or your time or your intelligence. Whatever you do, you do it first and foremost for yourself. Everyone else's happiness comes after yourself. I love you, remember that always._

_I love you. (Balin says hi)_

_Dwalin_

* * *

_It's fine. School's fine. I'm fine, I can handle it. I can. Don't worry, please. There's no need. Really. Please. I just miss you, I think having you here would calm me. There's so much going on all the time here. ~~They're all so revoltingly rich and hypocritical and I look at them and they disgust me. I know I'm like that. I know I'm just like that.~~ _

_I'm tired. Luckily school's almost over. I miss Frerin and Dee, and Balin. I miss Father-- and you, I miss you. These last few months have been hellish._

_Please write soon,_

_Thorin_

* * *
    
    
    SUMMER, 1983

Like the words to a song he's forgotten, only it's regret instead of beauty. He knows the dance far too well to not know it at all: you get out at the station, you grab your bags, you wait, maybe it's raining, maybe it's not. It's either the driver or Balin that pull up at the curb (he prays for a butler and gets Balin, and his stomach leaps into his throat like it's always lived there) and you stuff your suitcase into the backseat and cram yourself into the front seat.

And you think,  _three months of peace_ , only this time school's done for good. Thorin feels too small for his grown up bones and gulps down mouthfuls of air. Rinse and repeat, every single breath of his life. He feels like his words are hollow praying grounds stripped of any bones and meat, and he feels like he's losing part of himself every day a little deeper. He's sitting on his back porch after having just put his things away, Charlotte's nose on his lap.

Oakenshield manor is silent.

Growing up or not growing at all, and both options scare him. He is terrified all the time, loneliness a rattle of bones along the back of his neck, a sistrum marking the path of a dead child (although he knows it and always has that this child was already dead when he turned eleven- some beg to differ, some dig through the dirt with grey eyes trying to find the body and bring it back to life. Some do not give up until their nails are bloody. Some love.  _Some love_ ).

“I didn't know you smoked.”

Thorin stops staring at the gravel and wants to scream. His father stares down at him and all he feels is the anger the disgust the regret piled beneath his nails. He feels naked empty  _nothing_. He knows he should feel.

 _This is his father after all_ , only time is running by him too fast for him to make any sense of it.

The train ride back was quiet. It is always quiet, because that is how things are  _supposed to be_ . A quiet train ride, metaphors too elaborate to be real, guilt weighing him down, fear of his father weighing him down. He thinks of the roaring of track against wheels. He thinks of the roaring of blood inside veins. He'd slept. He blinks at Thrain. He feels alive, as if life were a weight gripping his neck and he were too weak and tired to shake it off. He feels longing. He feels, he  _feels_ , like some child who's just found the world and he doesn't know what to do with it, but youth was puked down the drain with his first kiss, and growing up is a solitary process of fitting bones that have broken to stretch back into place. None of them turn back to what they were before, and the injuries rot the blood and make the bitterness rise. It's too early for these kinds of thoughts. It's always too early these days to be anything more than breaths through a ribcage.

Thorin shrugs and half gestures with the cigarette he's clutching, “Some-- Sometimes.”

Is there anything else he can do? The last person he wants to see right now, standing and watching him, his sins plain to see, scrawled across his face in the angry scars of memories and screams and broken trust.

“May I sit?”

He cannot say no.

Thrain sits and sighs after Thorin's brief wide-eyed nod. He looks down at the dog, pats her old head and then begins loading his pipe with precise calculated movements, squinting through his glasses. Thorin looks at him and wants to set himself on fire. He looks at his father and wants to swallow bleach. The cycle is one that always falls into place, a dance of intimacy neither of them can escape: father and son always trapped in their shared blood and the way it never frees them. Blood is thicker than water.

Distantly, he feels his jaw and back and neck tense up. Thrain doesn't seem to notice, and Thorin doesn't care for him to, and they sit, quiet, for a moment that is actually a while, _the_ _longest time_ , because any moment with his father is a lifetime over, a hundred days a million, a thousand months spent trying to find the light and to  _understand_  and failing always _always_ , he feels his hands clam up and sweat, feels his chest start tensing around his heart. Nothing changes, nothing ever changes, it's always empty words always empty words always  _always_. A shaky drag from his cigarette is enough to stall the breathing for a moment-- he is still the same scared boy he was a year before, a year that's taken him by the hand and brought him to the deepest crevices of wonder and delight.

A year.

A fucking year.

Thorin buries the tip of his foot in the gravel. Charlotte whines in her sleep, shakes herself awake, eyes him. He smiles at her, but her attention is caught by Thrain's hand as she presses her nose to his palm and licks his fingers. Thrain smiles. It is an uncommon sight upon such a sad stern face.

“I-- I never apologized.”

Thorin blinks. He takes a drag of his cigarette, the smoke shaking its way through his throat into what he guesses are the rotten bowels of his body.

“ _Apologised_?”

“For January. For the... scene, I made.”

(Nails into his cheek, digging, a voice strangled by tears  _his own_  and by anger  _his father's_ , hands shaking, his throat burning as he puked, brain aching with snot and tears).

“You did nothing wrong, father.”

Thrain's smile becomes something bitter, a coating of lead in the throat that stops the sweetness of air to reach the lungs, the same as his sons, the same as his daughter.

“No, I did. I scared you. Called you horrible things. I don't think...” the words are as sticky as they are difficult for him to say, “I don't... think you're a faggot. I could never think that of you.”

Thorin is still so terrified of his father he is certain Thrain  _knows_  of the lie ( _doyoulettheboysfuckyou nonoipromiseiswear_ ) and he is certain he can  _see_  it, plastered now more than ever across his chest and hands. There are a few terrifying moments where he does not know whether he wants to gape at his father or laugh at him or both, but luckily he does nothing, and just sits. They both sit. Thorin stares into space and his father glances at him, and he feels like it's all slowly peeling off his bones and turning into ribbons and ribbons of discarded flesh.

"It's all right." Thorin mumbles, and it's all he will allow himself and grant Thrain. 

More silence. Thorin begins to wonder if it's just not yet another defence mechanism, a pause to help both of their hearts breathe. They know it is. It's funny, but it's true, and it's enraging and frustrating and sad that father and son have to hide from each other, but Thorin has Valerie's eyes and her smile and has the weight of the world on his carcass. Raising three children can be so terrifying, so  _lonely_ , so empty, and in his emptiness Thrain has made more mistakes than he can count or wants to admit. Aching children are a failure he cannot and does not want to allow himself: he is  _teaching them_ , and it is not his fault if they do not learn.

"Well, school's done."

Thorin forces a smile at this one, because he knows the weight's about to be dropped to crush his skull.

"Yeah."

"It's time you thought about your future, Thorin."

Thorin swallows and stubs out what's left of his cigarette. His father's tobacco impregnates the air, a taste on his tongue that he usually only associates with Thrain's office. There should be the smell of trees and dirt and wet dog outside. Not this.

Thorin shrugs.

"I guess."

Thrain glares at him and stands, wiping his pants, stretching his back. He's still clutching his pipe between his teeth.

"You  _know_  what would make your grandfather and me proud."

* * *

He stares at the wall. There is a single piece of plaster that is peeling off, and he picks at it with his nails until it flakes off and breaks, stuck between his skin and his nail. It stings and irritates him and he cautiously picks it away.

Thorin shuts his eyes. He tries to swallow down the sound of his heart beating, and he lies in a bed that sticks to his skin and is  _empty_ , it's empty. He stares at the ceiling. He stares at his own tiredness and wonders if bleeding it away might help. The walls of his room always do that to him. Home always crawls beneath his skin and tells him he should break it.

Nighttime is hollow. Hollow, hollow, hollow.

He thumbs a book, grabs it, opens it. Letters that spill out, perfectly kept. Black stains and secrets. His stomach churns, he feels their ichor stick to the tip of his fingers. He stares at them, stares at nothing again, knows he has a box of matches somewhere, feels his stomach kick with regret and the need to keep himself safe. He guards a secret on the back of his palm. He thumbs it, eyes it, runs it along his skin and feels its texture.

Dirty empty rotten.

Something that's loose in his chest, he knows fire will burn it clean off. Fear is louder, stronger, darker: fear always wins. There is no melody in his panicked thoughts, phrases jagged and sudden, single words. Thorin's slippers make hardly a sound against the floor, robe tight around his shoulders. He creeps out through a back door, walks a few feet in the garden where it's warm and heavy and summer creeps through the grass like a snake. He stands still.

After all it begins in a garden, like all things sacred, a crossing of streams and realities, those dreams that sometimes spill over into light and air and find his back and his throat and kiss him. Sometimes. Not always.

Not right now.

Thorin crouches down and piles Dwalin's letters neatly in the dirt and when he sets them on fire he tells himself he's doing it for himself and his well being but it doesn't make any sense. Something that he doesn't know tells him he has to do it and he obeys. Love letters with a boy aren't proper, they mark him and mask him from the light, filthy hands and teeth dirty with someone else's life. The smell of burnt paper is thick, dream like. He doesn't immediately realise what he's doing, feels like he's in a dream on the outskirts of some other reality. But he's here. He's real. He's burning paper, a box of matches so tight in his fist it's creaking like old bones. He's burning letters, something heavier and deeper, burning some part of his veins, he thinks, some part of his nervous system with them, pushes them into the ashes they belong within. His skin is crawling.

He's not so sure if he's awake or he's dreaming. He decides it doesn't matter, because the feeling of not being real is the realest thing in his body right now.

“You should wear a bit more than just slippers,” the voice is as light as the ashes that are now the color of dirt after he stomps the flame out when he knows the words have melted away and will melt into nothing with the first rain or curious animal.

He's burnt Dwalin's letters and Dwalin's voice finds his hands.

A dream, a dream, a dream, the only possible reality.

 _A dream within a dream_. Thorin jumps at the voice and slams a hand to his mouth. He drops the matches, tries not to scream. He looks up, to the darkness.

"Hey there, Blue Eyes." 

“ _What the fuck_?”

Dwalin steps out from behind the trees. Thorin blinks at him. It's false, a hallucination, he's lost it, he's  _finally_  lost it, he's finally tricked himself into believing he's real because this around him certainly isn't, no, no this cannot be real. Thorin falls very quiet, very still. He stares at Dwalin. The worlds crash and mingle: school and love, the good son, the sinner. In front of him, behind him, at his feet.

Dwalin carries the shadow of what looks like a black eye. Thorin takes a step back, and then another. He stares at him, unlit cigarette behind his ear and all, messy mohawk, a smirk hovering on the sides of his mouth ready to show itself, he stares at him, he looks, he really looks at this boy and he laughs.

He laughs because he has nothing else to do.

Dwalin giggles with him, “What can I say? I'm good at breaking into things.”

"You are _mad_."

"So you've said."

Oh, it shouldn't be this easy. It shouldn't be like he's never left, like he's never cried in his arms, like he's never slipped out of himself. It shouldn't be this easy, it shouldn't be _like this_. Every time he tries to break free and be a good boy Dwalin comes crashing back into his life, and then there's nowhere he can go, then there's only him in the wreckage and the rubble. He doesn't care.

Thorin lets himself fall and lips to Dwalin's, arms around him, in the small kiss they share he realises that he is willing to lie a thousand times to his father if it will mean this, if it will mean the pressure being taken from his lungs. Dwalin hums into the contact, cups Thorin's face.

"Hey there, Blue Eyes." he repeats. 

"Hey there," Thorin smiles.

Dwalin ignores the flames he saw being lit, ignores the fact deep down he knew what Thorin was burning, ignores the fact he is Oakenshield's  _dirty little secret_. He swallows all of this down, he lets it rest on the bottom of his stomach, he ignores it. He ignores the way it makes his body churn, he ignores the way it makes him feel angry and dirty and frustrated. Thorin's here and that's all that matters. He hates himself for depending so much on this boy, hates how in a year Thorin's taken him and turned him upside down and inside out. But this boy makes him quake and burn in ways no one else ever has.

This boy makes him feel like he's worth it, like he's alive, like he's  _something_  and  _someone_  and that _maybe he deserves to be happy_. Thorin presses his nose to Dwalin's cheek, kisses him and smiles. He pulls back.

"School's done, isn't it, Blue Eyes?" Dwalin chirps and Thorin's laughter is shaky at best, rickety and crumbling at worst. He tugs at his own hair and lowers his gaze, awkwardly smiling. A breath. A moment to think.

"Why did you come? If my father finds out, if he finds out _I lied_ \--"

"Because I love you. Because I can take it."

He says it without thinking, he lets it fall from his mouth, he lets it sing the joy in his ribs at the sight of Thorin, at Thorin's smile, because the good always outweighs the bad and in this case the good crashes through him like blue waves, as always, as is every time he sees Thorin. Every time he thinks they're done, done for good, and then Thorin smiles or laughs or simply exists. Dwalin runs a thumb along Thorin's jaw, catches his earlobe between his fingers. Thorin sighs, eyes closed, smile hovering over his grimace.

"I missed you."

He doesn't ask what he was burning, and Thorin wordlessly thanks him. Dwalin skits over the issue, Dwalin simply grabs his hands, and when they kiss it's as natural as drinking, as breathing, as finding himself.

* * *

Light that plays along his back and dips to kiss him between the shoulder blades. Thorin stares and closes his eyes. He sighs, as the sound of birds waking fills him to the brim. He runs a finger along the glass windowpane, taps against it.

He sees Dwalin in the reflection, a shape in his bed wrapped by sheets. The weight of the horror he's done is tangible, in the taste still on his tongue and the lingering weight between his legs, tactile memories of the night before that prick their way up his spine and still make him twitch between his heart and his breastbone. He's brought Dwalin into his arms, into his home, between his sheets with his father sleeping a breath away, his brother and sister in the rooms across from his. He'd done the unthinkable, brought sin to rest between his lips, muffled his moans with his hands and his very own pillows. He'd kissed Dwalin on  _his_  bed, felt his hands on him and grasped  _his_  own sheets for purchase, arched his back, had his eyes flutter open and stare at the familiar sight of his own ceiling. And now he's sitting, and waiting for Dwalin to wake up so he can watch him creep out back through the window, hands torn on Valerie's roses, a cocky smile tempting fate as he turns one last time to wave goodbye.

Dwalin rolls in the bed with a sigh and opens his eyes. He stares at Thorin, at the curve of Thorin's neck, at the back and the creases of his stomach and the tension of his thighs, his knees brought to his chest. He follows the dip of his jaw, the curve of his nose, his furrowed brow and worried frown. He watches as Thorin fogs the glass and traces a single oblique line in the steam. He watches the way his eyes shine and find themselves in the light, as if they were made for it, as if they were nothing but gold speckled sapphire. He has never felt this whole, or sane, or human. This boy with the worried lip and fluttering hands, this boy with the bright ideas and storm darkened eyes, this boy that is able to bring him to his knees with a smile.

This boy that erases every scar with a simple kiss.

"Good morning."

Thorin smiles wearily at him. Dwalin stares at the ceiling too, for a second, listens to the creaking of old wood and the weight of the sheets on his legs, and then lifts himself out of bed. He comes up to Thorin and rests his arms around his shoulders where he's sitting at the windowsill.

Lips to Thorin's forehead, Thorin shuts his eyes and swallows.

"How long have you been awake for?"

Thorin shrugs, "A bit." 

Heart that races at every sound, waiting, just  _waiting_  for his father to burst in. There is no way in this world he could not have heard him. There is no way in this world he cannot not  _know_ , simply by _existing_ , simply by breathing the same air his son has corrupted in every thrust and muffled moan, in the condom and the condom wrapper thrown on the floor. Thorin brings his knees to his chest and feels the dirt beneath his nails.

The dirt that melts away in the sudden rain of a kiss that Dwalin presses to his lips, sweet enough to calm the screams. Thorin finds himself digging his fingers into Dwalin's mohawk to drag him closer, sudden like the anguish that's taken him. He'd done the same that night, begging against his ear for  _harder_  and  _deeper_ , grabbing Dwalin's shoulders and driving him inside himself so hard and fast and heavy it had almost hurt, but it had been loud enough in the burning of muscles and the stretch of a body inside him to drown out for the time being the terror, the guilt, the feeling of his own chest exploding, and Dwalin had buried his moans in the teethmarks along Thorin's shoulders, far enough from his neck to be easily covered by a shirt. Dwalin's back is a crisscross of nail marks: they'd been kind and violent to each other, Thorin needing the absence of anything but pleasure to burn the life out of him, suddenly realising as he stared at the ceiling and he felt Dwalin move inside him like a ravine that this was  _love_ , this was  _love_ , this was what was destined to save him.

He feels like saying it out loud right now will make everything all right for a moment, so "I love you," he mumbles. Dwalin's naked chest and tattoos are tinted golden in the dawn that falls through the window and finds its prayers in the stained glass of their skin, in the million light reflections of their bodies marked by love. Bite marks and hickeys and nails: Dwalin's running his thumb along Thorin's shoulder.

"Did I hurt you?"

Thorin shakes his head, and it's the truth and nothing but the truth.

"No," he still says in utmost confirmation, and lifts a hand to brush it along Dwalin's lips. Dwalin grabs it, kisses the fingers, closes his eyes. He prays in the only language he knows, through his body, he prays from the tip of Thorin's fingers to the wrists. He maps an invocation in their tangle of fingers, he maps a chant as he grabs Thorin and guides him back to bed, and the polyphonic tones burst with Holy light when Thorin follows him and kisses him slowly and deeply to chase away the fear.

The boy's legs on either side of his hips, the boy kissing him, the boy smiling, and he knows he is the source of the smile and God it fills him with golden light. His heart sings, and he finds himself inside Thorin's eyes.

Thorin whispers, "You should--"

"I should go?"

And Oakenshield lowers his gaze, light slipping for a moment behind shame and its greyness.

"I just don't want anyone to see you."

Dwalin kisses Thorin quickly on the lips, "I know." and then he pushes Thorin off of him delicately, smiles as Thorin scrambles to sit on his bed. Dwalin stands and grabs his clothes from off the floor, tiptoes across the room to find his cigarettes. He grabs the condom and shoves it into the trash with its wrapper, pushes it under crumpled pieces of paper and a biscuit box. He hums as he does this, low, under his breath, so that no one but Thorin can hear him.

He absently glances to the desk, and his mind skits over the British Army leaflet without giving it much thought. It takes him a moment. It takes him a second, and then he comes back to it, and he picks it up.

"Thorin, what's this?" he asks.

Thorin walks up as he finishes pulling his shirt on, "What's what?"

"What's this?"

Thorin stares at the pamphlet. He begins wringing his hands almost immediately, he lowers his gaze again, stares at the tip of his bare feet, at his toes which curl a little. 

Dwalin stares at him. He can feel the gaze stuck to his skin, to his sudden quietness.

"No."

"It's-- it's okay. It's not a final decision. I've been thinking about it for a few wee-"

" _No_."

Thorin grabs it out of Dwalin's gasp and Dwalin doesn't stop him. He's gone numb. Something in his throat is screaming. This isn't how it should be.

"You're doing this for  _him_?"

"I'm not. I'm-- _I haven't decided yet_."

The quiver in the voice that says that it's a lie.

Dwalin stares at the booklet in Thorin's clenched fists and he lunges forward, rips it out of his grasp.

" _Meet the army_ ," he reads, " __a guide for parents, partn_ \--  _ partners. And. And friends. Oh, please,  _please_  tell me you're not serious."

Dwalin thumbs through the pages, looks at Thorin and Thorin stares. Grey eyes that shatter bit by bit and piece by piece. Grey eyes that look betrayed. Grey eyes that look scared.

Grey eyes that hold the world inside them.

Thorin's shoulders that tense, Dwalin's hands that shake.

"No. No.  _Please_."

"It's what he wants and what my grandfather wants and--"

" _Thorin_."

No, Dwalin's voice isn't supposed to  _break like this_ . Dwalin isn't supposed to  _break like this_ , he isn't supposed to crumble in the way he's looking at Thorin, this isn't right, Dwalin is his  _rock_ , Dwalin is. _Dwalin is_. Thorin doesn't know to hold Dwalin's hands if they're shaking.

"It's okay. I'll be fine."

"This is the  _army_ . People _die_ . People die  _every day_. This is imperialistic bullshit, this is--"

Thorin's heart claws at him in terrified screams that fall quiet in his clenching jaw when Dwalin seems to  _keen_ , Dwalin seems to bend and break beneath the weight.

"It's nothing too bad, Dwalin, it's nothing to  _worry about_."

But even his words sound hollow. Why does time always rush by? Why can he never stop it, never tell it to stop running, never calm it long enough for him to make sense of everything and nothing and all of this  _forever_  and  _always_  and  _there's no going back_ ? He stops and stares at Dwalin and Dwalin moves against the rock that is Thorin's perception, crashes into his reality like water breaking fragile dams of concrete. He's grabbing Thorin's hands,  _Meet the army_  abandoned on the floor. He's shaking.

"I can't lose you.  _I can't lose you just so your father can fulfil his power fantasies, Thorin_ . _Thorin_. Don't do this. _Don't let him win_."

Thorin pulls himself out of Dwalin's grip. Dwalin's loneliness grabs his hands and makes him reach for Thorin again, Dwalin's empty, Dwalin's fear, the fear that made him trace Thorin's back with the tip of his fingers, as delicate as butterflies dancing on grass, mapping every pore to memory like he were learning poetry for school, is the same fear that now makes him find Thorin's hands despite Thorin trying to hold them back.

He grabs Thorin's hands and feels his pulse and he needs it and wants it and he realises all of a sudden that the mere thought of losing it is enough to make him want to scream.

(And yet all his cacophony of anguish happens with whispers, because Thorin's fear of being heard comes before and is greater than any cancer gnawing at his fearful little soul).

He doesn't know, exactly, when his knees give out, all he knows is that he is scared. All he knows is that there is a plethora of pain in his chest that has come crashing down in his lungs and they race for air up his throat. Before he can stop himself, Dwalin is burying his face in Thorin's hands, holding them, crushing them in his grip, and he is crying.

"Don't do this." he begs, and does not recognise his voice, " _please don't do this_." 

"Dwalin--"

"I can't lose you," a mantra, " _I can't, I can't, I can't_ . _Please_. Thorin."

But Thorin is staring at him, wide eyed, and the only solution those blue eyes can see is escape. He tears himself out of Dwalin's hands once more, guilt making it impossible to think. He was never supposed to see Dwalin like this. Dwalin doesn't move from the floor. Dwalin doesn't raise his gaze.

"Go." Thorin snarls, a cruelty he always knew he had, but Dwalin's never seen it, Dwalin's never tasted it up close, " _Go_ ." harsher still, "I've already made up my mind.  _Go_ , before you wake up the whole house." 

Dwalin sits on his haunches. It takes him a moment, and in that moment thinks of yelling so loud Thrain will hear, and then Thorin will have no way of hiding his sins.  _Punish him_ _,_ but it is something he could never bring himself to do. 

So he stands, so he wipes his face with his hands and presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. Thorin's hugging himself and he does not want to waste the time and _look_ , he does not want to commit the brokenness to memory. Dwalin glances, though, because he's ever only listened to his heart and not his mind.

When he gets home it's still dark and quiet, and when he gets home he barrels his way up the stairs, slams the door. There are things one cannot and does not have to think about: Dwalin's hands itching and burning and his muscles all up in arms and screaming are one of them, are a thing that is part of him that he knows is how it is, that he has learned to control.

The mattress is the first to be torn from its place, and the pillows thrown across the room and the sheets, ripped, a tear for every fractured inch inside of him, a soul screaming.  _I can't I can't I can't_.

Not tonight. Not this morning. Not like this. Not like a  _pig destined for slaughter_  not being  _daddy's perfect little boy_  not being this, not  _this_ , not bleeding on his own blood with a land mine breaking his spine. Not lost, not a hero, not a name on a plaque.

He roars when the water glass hits the closed door and he roars louder when he tears the books out of the shelves, pages and covers ripping when he throws them, and Dwalin punches the wall. His knuckles crack and the skin splits and he bleeds.

Balin opens the door and finds him cradling his hand.

"He's joining the army."

And Balin nods.

"You knew?"

"His father told me they'd spoken about it, the day he came home from school."

" _You knew_."

Bitterness is less heavy than the need,  _bone deep_ , that Dwalin has for his older brother. He flexes his skinned hands and whines not for the pain but for the loneliness.

"I don't want him to get killed."

Balin sighs. Some things are better left unsaid, some things cannot be escaped, some fathers weigh too much, say too much, are much too large to chase away. Balin holds the door open, as dawn finally becomes morning and the clock chimes 7 AM.

"Come on, lad," he whispers, "Let's get you cleaned up."

 


	15. xiv

There is a difference between fists hitting a punching back and desperation, and it is a subtle one, a slight one, as small as a bug crawling its way up your back, as delicate as dust and just as poisonous. Dwalin doesn't know which is which right now, only that either one or the other is screaming blood through his veins and knuckles that are about to bleed, a heartbeat that's being chased back to the nightmare where it belongs. He feels his back beg him to stop, his arms burning through his neck and he does not. _He does not_. He needs to drown it out into the feeling of his body working, take it out to sea and hold it underwater until it stops thrashing. _It_. The pamphlet and Thorin's eyes and the army and death and dying and the high cost of living and Thorin's eyes and everything always all at once.

He never thought it would be  _this_ .

He never thought he would be begging on his knees for mercy, any kind of mercy, any kind of hope or resignation or acceptance of his pain.

He's not  _used_ to begging. He didn't think it suited him well. He still doesn't think it suits him well. It suits him  _wrong_ , strange, different, this desperate obedience that's been carved out from his throat. He doesn't love, usually. He doesn't think he is beautiful enough to be loved, either, he doesn't think his scar is enough to have Thorin look at him like he holds all the answers underneath his tongue and between his fingers.

Dwalin lands a series of punches against the leather and hears his bones creaking and his muscles aching.  _Good_ , he thinks.  _Good, good, good_ .

He doesn't want to lose that gaze to Thrain's whims and wishes. He doesn't want to fall apart, doesn't want to lose himself.  _Devotion like this isn't healthy_ and there's a voice in the back of his head that's begging him to go and leave but what if Thorin  _needs him_ \-- what if Thorin needs him and he's not there? Besides, besides there is light in his chest through his stomach into his kneecaps across his arms, light that there is no other way to describe, light that lifts him and purifies him and makes him real whole and worth, worthier than he has ever been or ever seen himself.

Sweat grips the back of his neck and soaks his shirt and hair. He stops punching, he watches as the bag slowly but surely stops oscillating and comes to a standstill. Light turns to dark too easily, and love melts into fear, over and over and over again.

Dwalin starts landing punches again and none of them manage to calm his heart, clear his mind, none of them make sense, they're all red, just red.

* * *

Thorin takes a moment to catch his breath, leaning against the edge of the pool. He massages the bridge of his nose with his index and thumb and then snaps his goggles back on.

Few things are more sacred than a body moving, few things make the shine of God's light any brighter. It is all here, fallen into perfect place: the muscles working, the flex of them, the quiet graciousness of the single breaths, of the heartbeats that each one of them extends. When his body drifts those few fractions of seconds before the first stroke, he feels his soul rest against his fingertips, barely above water, tingling the way his own palm does when he tests the bounds of superficial tension and the water barely laps at his skin. The first stroke crashes close to his left ear, the second one takes his right, he twists his head to the side, takes a breath, fills himself with air and then he goes under again, a few strokes dragging him along until the next breath, and then again, and again, until his fingertips hit the edge of the pool.

He stops and takes his time to savor the burn in his chest as he comes up for air.

“That was _good_.”

He turns in the water, startled, and hits his elbow against the edge in the process. The ache rings through his bones up to his knuckles, and he grimaces. Dwalin's standing at the other end of the pool and his arms are crossed.

“You okay there?” he asks.

“It's fine.” Thorin mumbles, massaging his arm. Dwalin clears his throat and smiles, wide, and it is like sunshine cracking through a broken roof, as he walks over to Thorin and extends his hand.

Thorin takes it gladly, and Dwalin helps him out of the pool. He blushes and pulls back when Dwalin tries to kiss him.

“Not here, someone might see.”

“Like who? Your father isn't home.”

Thorin shrugs and takes off his swim cap and his goggles.

“Frer. Or Dis.”

Dwalin furrows his eyebrows, “I thought they didn't count. I thought they were, I don't know, I didn't think--”

“Better safe than sorry.”

He says it as if it were a rule. Dwalin snaps his tongue back into place and weighs his words enough to know now is not the time to argue, now is the time to find the breach in Thorin's defenses and crawl past it: he'd never tear the walls down, now that he knows tearing them down risks tearing it all apart.

“I'm not _mad_ , Thorin, if that's what this is. You know that, right?”

Thorin doesn't grant him the benefit of eye contact. Instead, he mumbles: “I can never tell.” and Dwalin feels the ghost of his own father against his ribs. He chases it away like he's chasing a fly, with a sweep of his hand beneath Thorin's chin, two fingers that lift his head, that ask delicately for the benefit of eye contact, something he thinks is his right. He thinks this isn't a conversation you have on the edge of a pool, but rules don't exist when he's with Thorin: when he's with Thorin it's all tripping and trapezing, hoping he won't lose his footing, only he does every time almost comically–- the blue in Thorin's eyes falls in place like a sky without clouds and Dwalin doesn't know who he was before finding it, and he curses himself and he tells himself that it's okay, because what else is there to say? when you know you are lost and there's no turning back. Thorin's eyes speak louder than his voice, and he could drown in them, he could beg on his knees for them.

The bird hits the glass wall of the pool. Thorin jolts, Dwalin feels the moment breaking like the top of oily water.

“ _Shit_ \--”

A pause. They wait for the air to change. It flows back into their chests, the surprise purged from it, in the quick space of a moment.

“-- I need to get dressed.”

“I'll check on it.”

The bird is dead.

Dwalin crouches down to get a closer look: its head lies at an unnatural angle, at ninety degrees compared to the body, eye blank, beak stained red. A little death, perfectly pointless, utterly unnecessary, and yet it's here and it's happened, and there's nothing that can be done.

Dwalin sighs and picks it up, more delicately than he thought he would, in time for Thorin to come up next to him, wet hair matted to his forehead.

“Dead?”

“Dead.”

MacFundin catches himself cradling the body, the still small paws, the ruffled wings. A little death.

“Help me bury it?” Thorin asks. It's just a bird, and it's stupid, but he doesn't know what else to say.

Dwalin nods. They find a spot near the bushes that coasts the pathway back towards the house, where the ground is soft enough to dig with their bare hands. It's Thorin that does it. Dwalin watches him while he works, holding a bird's dead body, and the phrase _your own undertaker_ forms in his brain all shivering and new. He twists his mouth to the side and blinks to chase the thought away, but he can't help but draw the similarities through the air like red yarn, from the back of Thorin's head to the middle of the bird's chest, a quiet little litany of many hearts and a single life that could be broken, all because some boys sometimes are just too scared. Dwalin looks down at the bird and almost expects it to move: Thorin's movements, the curve of a body that is without a doubt _alive_ are enough, feel enough in their warmth to be able to breathe back life into dead flesh. It's what Dwalin hopes. It's what he's been hunting for for what seems forever.

And here's the catch, here's the funny thing: he didn't know how lonely he was until Thorin kissed him, and he kissed him back.

Thorin stands back up and wipes his hands on his trousers. He turns towards Dwalin and looks a little awkward and maybe even scared. Unsettled might be the right word: he can't stop staring at the bird, and it is so quiet and small and silent and _dead_ , which is the one thing that sits weirdly in the air and tinges it with grey and frost. Dwalin crouches down, places it in the small hole. The world snaps back into place: the bird is no longer in his hands screaming to be made to rest. There's no shake in his fingers, not anymore: all he feels is dirty for having touched a dead bird. The moment is gone, it's breathed out, the weight in his chest is snuffed out, he doesn't have to think about it, he doesn't have to breathe it anymore. It disappears bit by bit as he covers it.

A little death.

He knows it will come back as a bitter aftertaste in a few hours.

Thorin clears his throat.

“I-- I have lemonade in the pantry or scotch in my father's office.”

It is blasphemous, almost, to talk so close to where the dead rest, but it's just a dead bird and a strange out of this world interruption, and now the world's back and the bird's underground, and Dwalin tells himself to get a grip.

“Wouldn't your father notice?”

“He won't mind.”

The light of the setting sun, a last scream of dwindling summer days, drowns them both in amber oranges: a lovely sight, as it sinks over the tree lines. Dwalin sits on the sofa in Thrain's office that faces the large windows, behind him there's the sound of glass against glass, a slight clink. The light falls across his neck and Thorin watches it as it rushes to meet his shoulders, claws at his jaw and makes it even sharper, and he can't look away. There is a kind of beauty that feels like water hatching and pulsing in your chest, a layer of liquid between your heart and your sternum: he feels it bubbling when Dwalin stands, a wave that hits him between the eyes. It is like walking underwater and being able to breathe, for once and only once that lasts a lifetime. Dwalin is beautiful, and it breaks his bones like glass.

He doesn't look away as Dwalin approaches him and his father's desk. Dwalin kisses him, and this is how they mend their wounds: they do not talk, they hardly do, they kiss and fuck and moan their apologies through gritted teeth and twitching lips. Dwalin smirks as he takes the drink from Thorin's hand and Thorin still tastes his lips and lowers his gaze and hopes Dwalin won't be able to tell. The light of the sun, the way it falls across his face and runs its fingers along his scar and broken nose, the way it elevates Dwalin's eyes and turns them into air, the light fills MacFundin's gaze with might and glory. Thorin feels it deep inside his chest, and chases it away with a generous gulp of whiskey.

Dwalin chases the gulp Thorin's just taken down his throat, with his tongue, with one hand caressing Thorin's jaw and the other tangling in his hair. Forceful and abrupt, a double edged blade and a coin with two sides, _you're mine_ and _don't go_. They don't need the words to cauterize their wounds because their words are not the tools they need. They don't know how to wield sharper blades or darker pains in words, they don't know how to weigh them on their tongues and reassess them, so they hunt for them with their hands and eyes and flesh, with their bodies driven into one another. Dwalin presses his body to Thorin's, taking the hands from his hair and jaw to his hips, chest to chest, breaths an intermezzo. Dwalin pulls back, and he's panting slightly. He lets his gaze trail along Thorin, he lets it dip its fingertips into his eyes and then another kiss, a deeper one, to find the pain that's taken root inside his heart and chase it away the way he would with fists. He finds his hand back to the nape of Thorin's neck, he finds his body needing more than this.

“We haven't even finished our first _drink_ ,” Thorin whispers, and there's a slight smirk in his voice. Dwalin arches an eyebrow, takes his glass, takes a sip and then a second and then empties it with a third. When Thorin's kissed by him, he's fed scotch from Dwalin's lips to his. He swallows it, and it burns his throat. Dwalin kisses what little leaks out of his mouth.

It takes little to have Thorin's behind bump into Thrain's desk.

“May I?” Dwalin asks, hand hovering near the hem of Thorin's shirt.

Thorin nods.

He gasps, quietly and small like he always does at first, and Dwalin grasps the sound of that gasp and embroiders it into his memory, every inch of skin a new stitch, he is always renewing the tapestry through the curve of Thorin's hips, up to his back, to the shoulder blades and then back down, across his ribcage. When Dwalin grazes his nipples Thorin huffs and closes his eyes. MacFundin stops and waits: it's not permission, not entirely, and he wants it all, not a half permission, not a yes coerced from tight lips. He wants Thorin and he wants to be sure he is wanted, because he knows that those kind of stains don't ever come off.

Thorin kisses him, and grabs his hand, and guides it to between his legs. There is something both terrible and vulnerable in the way his gaze darkens and his breath hitches, in the way he shuts his eyes and moans very, very quietly when Dwalin squeezes slightly. Dwalin grins and grinds his palm between Thorin's legs and Thorin's moan gets a little louder and a little more strangled, and something twitches in Dwalin too, blood rushing where it should be. He presses himself against Thorin, both hands on his hips and presses his lips to Thorin's neck. Thorin still tastes slightly of chlorine.

“I'll go and get the lube I left here last time, all right?”

“Wait.”

“Okay.”

As Dwalin pulls his body away from his the room claws its way back into view, as violently as a bloodletting. He could care, he couldn't care less, he cares too much, he doesn't give a shit, he cares, he doesn't, he has to stop to steady his hands that shake all of a sudden and doesn't manage to. They won't stop shaking, he can't stop seeing the office in full color that's all around him, clawing at him in the velvet lined chairs and the mahogany bookshelves and the great oaken desk that he's leaning against and he feels, most importantly of all, the pleasure in his crotch become nausea in his stomach. He lowers his head.

“Hey. It's all okay.”

Dwalin slips a finger underneath Thorin's chin and pulls it up. They dance this way. They dress their wounds. Thorin tries to twist his face into a smile.

Dwalin sighs almost imperceptibly and then lets go of Thorin's chin. He presses their noses together, “It's all good, Blue Eyes.”

“I just can't--”

“It's okay.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't say that.”

“But I am.”

“It's _okay._ ”

That's not the _point_. He feels like he's opened an angry gash between them because he's made a mistake, this is a mistake, and he feels the annoyance in every one of Dwalin's gazes-- he might not show it, he might say simply _it's okay_ , but Thorin already feels the layer underneath the surface, the sticky thick darkness like petrol that marks his skin, that stains him, that--

“Hey, _hey_. Don't you ever think you owe me sex-- _ever_. You can say stop whenever you want, and I will stop. It's all okay.”

Dwalin grabs Thorin's shaking hands and holds them, tight, squeezes them firmly but not hard enough to hurt him. Thorin's shoulders relax.

“I'm sorry.”

“Stop that. It's okay.”

Thorin flinches, and it's Dwalin's turn.

“I'm sorry. But-- really. I hate to see you apologize. There's nothing to apologize for.”

Thorin lowers his gaze. Dwalin's still holding his hands.

“...wanna cuddle on the couch?” he asks, then, a little tentatively. Dwalin's smile is so warm his eyes become encased in a million little creases. It's so beautiful Thorin has to stop, for a moment, and forget his terror.

“I'd love to.”

 

* * *

 

 

There's a scream beneath his skin, and it's crawling. It's begging and hissing and snapping its jaws, and it's _crawling_.

Frerin opens his eyes. His back aches, his neck aches, his throat and his hands. He is the ache, deep rooted deep seated in his bones: it's not the flu and it isn't a bad sleeping position. It's an itch, like a million splinters in every pore. He can't stay still, and it is hitting his throat with bile. Frerin stands.

He sits in his room, pitch black, on the side of the bed, for a few seconds, and then hunts for his glasses on his bedside table until he knocks into them and nearly knocks a glass over. He switches his lamp on, legs slightly open, each hand placed on each knee. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He sits. He waits, but the itch doesn't stop and the ache doesn't quiet.

Frerin stands, he pulls a shirt on just in case someone else is wandering, but the house is large enough to allow four people to be lonely as much as they want, as long as they want, and for the few staff employed to keep out of the way, because this is a lonely house for lonely people, and that is the only way they've survived this long.

Frerin stands. The bathroom's across the hall from his room and as he walks the house creaks beneath him. He rinses his face. He sighs, he rubs the bridge of his nose, he glances at himself in the mirror. The sight is sticky and uncomfortable, a face he doesn't like stapled to the body of a person he can't bear the sight of. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He stares at the sink and feels himself very small, very very small, the itch growing and burning and making his chest feel like iron, a fire that not even the water's managed to calm down. He dries his face with a towel. As he's walking back to his room, he sees that the light in his father's room's still on. The light bleeds into the otherwise dark corridor. He glances at his watch: three AM. His father's not home and the light irks him, he figures it's just Thorin that forgot it on. To switch it off he has to open the door and kill the switch right next to it.

They're curled up on the couch that faces the window.

It takes him a moment to process it. Does he know it? Did he expect it? Was it one of those known but not said things? Thorin's lying on top of Dwalin, head on his chest, one of Dwalin's hands on the small of his back, the other tangled in his hair.

Frerin imposes himself on their father for a moment and in his mind his hands are bloody. He clenches his fists, both of them, first one then the other, right to left, and the movement sends a surge up his arms into his chest, like breeze along grass. Frerin breathes.

They're asleep.

The flare in Frerin's bones peaks, sudden and burning. His mouth goes dry. He sees them clear and brilliant, like staring in the sun too long, and he feels-- he has to stop and pick apart every emotion he feels, unless he'll drown in them, or choke or both and that is _worse_.

He feels frustration. Why frustration? Frustration marries well with anger, which is something else he's feeling right now. Frustration and anger. What else? Bitterness. Why these? He knows it's not wrong. There's nothing wrong, per se, in who his brother fucks, and Dwalin is certainly a better choice than most but--

But there's something that's caught in his throat and he knows it'll poison and sour his mouth.

He decides against switching the light off and he leaves the door ajar like he found it.

“Frerin.”

Her voice is a whisper.

“ _Jesus_ , Dee, you scared me.”

So is his.

Dis smiles, “Sorry.”

He glances at the door and then, “Did you  _know_ about this?”

She shakes her head.

“If Thrain finds out--”

“But he _won't_ , Frer.”

Frerin bites his lower lip.

“He _can't find out_ , Frerin.”

This feels like a pact sealed in blood.

“Thorin doesn't have to force us to do this.”

“You'd _tell Father_?”

“No, are you out of your mind? I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I just--”

_How dare he_ . How dare he do this when Frerin's struggling every day for a father's approval that'll never come just because of what he is, how  _dare_ Thorin do this behind Thrain's back.

There it is, crisp and clear, he's found it after digging through the strands of it and picking it up like a coin in the rubble. He acknowledges it, and he stares at the two and the crack in his chest breaks for good. His anger is unfair, and he knows it's unfair but there's nothing he can do about it. He is rage always billowing inside him ensnared by kindness. Sometimes the kindness breaks, sometimes the bitterness is louder. Dis sighs and Frerin rubs the bridge of his nose. He whips his glasses back on. 

“I think I'm going back to bed,” he mumbles. The empty slowly ebbs into the burning like ink into water.. His sister nods, her blue eyes framed by disheveled dark hair. She seems to have lost some weight, or maybe it's just the lighting.

“Goodnight, Frer.”

“Goodnight, Dee.”

 

* * *

 

Thorin wakes up enough for the room around him to feel real and not just part of his dreams. Beneath him, Dwalin shifts, too, and groans.

“Fuck, _my neck_.”

Thorin kisses his jaw and stretches out like a cat, “I think falling asleep on my father's couch was a bad idea.”

“Especially since you're ramming your elbow into my ribcage. Get up, Blue Eyes, I can't breathe.”

Thorin smirks and rolls off of Dwalin, landing on the floor and turning to rest his head on Dwalin's lap. Dwalin rolls his eyes and sits up. Thorin stands and his back pops loudly. 

“Yeah. That's an uncomfortable couch.”

“How are you?”

“What?”

Dwalin grabs Thorin's hands and kisses them. The fingertips, then the palms.

“ _Dwalin_.”

“I asked, how are you?”

Thorin shrugs.

“Fine, why?”

“Fine?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“Is it-- is _this about the sex_?”

“Have I done something wrong?”

Thorin pulls his hands away and drops them at his sides. And then he brings them back up, brushes his fingertips along Dwalin's jaw, his left cheek.

“No. You've done nothing wrong. It's me, I'm--” a shrug, “I'm fucked up.”

Dwalin scowls and grows quiet. 

“What?”

“Don't ever--” he grabs Thorin's hands before they can reach the scarring on his forehead and nose, “ _don't ever think you're wrong_.”

Thorin wants to pry himself out of his grasp but Dwalin's holding them too tight. Too much, too  _about him_ , there's nothing to talk about anyway, nothing--

“Don't _ever_ think that. Ever.”

Thorin's shoulders sag, “ _I didn't mean it_ .”

“You did.”

“I'm... sorry, then?”

Dwalin lets go of Thorin's hands. There's no use in arguing, not this early and not about this. He stands up and stretches his back, too, smooths out his wrinkled shirt.

“What time is it?”

“Three PM.” Thorin mumbles, staring at the clock. 

“Th-- three-- did we sleep nearly ten hours?”

“Fell asleep at half past two, so yeah.”

Dwalin stifles a laugh and Thorin mumbles to himself.

“What _now_ , Thorin?”

“I wasted an entire day.”

“You cuddled me, that's not a waste.”

Thorin stares at him for a heartbeat and then rolls his eyes.

“I'm going downstairs to get some coffee.”

 

* * *

 

Dwalin stirs his cup absent-mindedly. He's staring at the calendar hanging from the kitchen wall and not actually paying attention to it, eyes scanning along the numbers left to right and up and down. Thorin's just finished rinsing his own mug.

“How long's your dad away for?”

“Wha-- Another four... four days, yeah, why?”

“How would you feel about coming to Scotland with me?”

Thorin's head shoots up.

“ _Excuse me_?”

“How would you feel about coming to Scotland with me?”

Thorin laughs.

“I'm _serious_.”

“And, _what_? Leave Frerin and Dis?”

“Balin can take care of them. Just for a day. Two nights. We leave now, sleep on the road, get to Glasgow, sleep at my mum's and then come back the next morning. How about it?”

“You're mental. You're bloody mental.”

“I've never been more serious in all my life. I want to show you what's important to me. I want you to share in what I love.”

He is viciously attached to Thorin. The thought of him dying while serving fills him with the need to capture every moment with him.  _You're being silly_ . I don't care.  _I don't care_ .

“But-- Frerin and Dee-”

“I don't think they'll mind not having their brother around for a day or so.”

Thorin licks his lips and seems to think. Dwalin's standing.

“Please? For me?”

Thorin sighs.  


 

* * *

 

Balin stares at the two boys sitting in his office and sighs.

“Does your father know?”

“No.”

“Will you tell him?”

“N-- maybe.”

Thorin loses more and more of his footing every time he answers. He shouldn't be doing this. He's already broken a million rules, and he shouldn't be doing this. He's given himself enough, it's fine as it is, running off is mad, asking for other people to cover for him is  _mad_ , falling in love is and was mad but that didn't seem to stop him in the first place,  _did it_ ?

“You came _all the way_ from the house to the offices to ask me this?”

“Yes.”

Balin shuffles some papers on the desk.

“How long will you be gone for?”

“Two nights and a day.”

Balin glares at his little brother, who's grinning at him with each and every one of his teeth. He then glances at Thorin, who's playing with a pencil and makes every possible effort to avoid his gaze. The eldest MacFundin brother sighs, deeply, and then sets down the papers he's holding.

//

“They're leaving.”

“What?”

“They've decided to go on a day trip to Scotland and will be back the day after tomorrow.”

Frerin blinks from over the book he's reading.

“...Well that's not exactly _subtle_ , is it?”

Dis widens her arms and shrugs.

“Balin'll come to keep an eye on us.”

Frerin scoffs and goes back to reading his book. He clutches it a little too tight, and shakes his head once.

//

Thorin stares out the car window, clutching his backpack. Dwalin taps on the steering wheel in rhythm with whatever tune he's humming, occasionally glancing over at Thorin. Thorin doesn't say a word.

“You seem tense.”

“I _am_.”

The light is still red, so Dwalin has the time to turn towards Thorin and say, “Hey. Hey. Look at me. You don't have to feel bad about this. It's just fun. We're having a bit of fun.”

“Yeah but this is _really fucking far_.”

“Seven hours in the car, tops-”

“The light's green.”

“I know,” he starts the car again,”it's just for a day. Just for a day. I want you to meet my mum.”

“Father-”

Dwalin glances a second towards Thorin and places a hand to the back of his neck, massaging it. Thorin bats it away.

“Thrain won't have to know.”

Thorin runs his finger up and down the window, it squeaks, “But  _I will_ .”

 

* * *

 

“ D'you mind pulling over for a moment? I have to pee.”

They're in the middle of the countryside, on a road that's deserted and also very narrow. Thorin shrugs. Dwalin pulls the car to the side of the road. He switches it off, hops outside and leans in through the open windo.

“ _Don't_ run away back to London.”

Thorin rolls his eyes, “Go  _pee_ , you Scottish Bastard.”

He steps out of the car too, tired of being forced in such a stuffy environment for so long. He paces around for a few steps, and then leans back against the hood of the car/

At least there's the sound of crickets, and the vastness of night that's beginning to fall to deaf ears. Thorin feels a hole in his chest and it's heavy and he's used to it. He curls a fist and places it against his breast, and wonders if the hole is large enough to fit his hand in.

He shouldn't feel like this, it isn't right, it is unfair. The empty that sits in his chest and leans up towards the sky and the void, like armor resting on his chest and shoulders encasing his neck, heavy, that pierces the back of his skull but draws no blood at all.

He yawns: the hole in his chest widens with his lungs and pushes no poison in his limbs. He picks at his nails. Dwalin reappears, zipping his pants up again.

“All set.”

Guilt. The hole in his chest is guilt.

Dwalin leans back against the hood of the car next to Thorin and lights himself a cigarette. MacFundin waits for a few quiet seconds, but Thorin doesn't budge, Thorin stares at his hands. When Dwalin's arms slip around his hips and Dwalin's forehead comes to rest against Thorin's temple, Thorin feels, distinctly, like breeze coming in from a window, the corruption ease away, the tension give. He surprises his hands clutching Dwalin's, he surprises his heartbeat increasing to the rhythm of the living. 

He clings to Dwalin without realising it. 

“He's not here.”

Thorin scoffs and feels himself slip behind the glass: things always become easier when he can't really know they're real, and this unexpected display of foolish emptiness shames him, the stains caking his skin, seeping through, weighing so hard he wants to tear the off. He is a foolish little boy who thinks the world owes him, who thinks he is entitled to happiness, who thinks he deserves the pain he feels when he has done nothing to earn it. He shrivels into Dwalin's arms, he winces inside of them, he hunts for the boundaries of his own body inside them and all Dwalin does is whisper little truths to him, like promises and jewels. He almost tricks himself into believing Dwalin's just said “You  _deserve_ this,” but he knows he deserves many things and happiness is never one of them- boys who love boys do not deserve a single thing, boys who love boys are dead boys, are shame-boys, are whore-boys. The guilt that he screams at himself makes him cling to Dwalin, again and again and again in the tightness of the hug, and Dwalin's arms are loud enough to cancel the pain, loud enough,  _loud enough_ . Until Dwalin lets go and Thorin finds himself scrambling for anything louder than the white noise in his skin.

Thorin sits on the hood. Dwalin stands in front of him: it's easier to hug that way anyway, Thorin's arms looping around Dwalin's hips, squeezing, burying his face in his chest. Dwalin hesitates an instant, then he runs his hands through Thorin's hair.

No cars come by.

Dwalin dips Thorin's head back and presses his lips to Thorin's, in the quiet small way they know how to do, and the sound of crickets peppers their breathing. MacFundin cups Thorin's face, Thorin's lips are still parted, his eyes still closed, and in the moment before Thorin opens his eyes Dwalin thinks that he will never not want to save him.

Thorin opens his eyes, then, and Dwalin knows for certain that he will never not want to save him.

Dwalin presses his forehead to his, both hands on either side of Thorin's face. And in the night of a nondescript country road, Dwalin leans into the deepest dark, and whispers his real name. He decides to do so through gestures, because they are the only words that truly ever work for him: it's Thorin who's all billowing metaphors, cascades of feelings strung up on gilded words. All Dwalin knows is how to kiss and touch he knows how to smile and make love and fuck. He knows how to hold, he knows how to chase demons away with fingers digging into clothes and bodies rocking, one way or another. 

He doesn't ask Thorin to talk, doesn't ask what's wrong, doesn't care to notice that the metaphors traced by his hands are as beautiful as those spoken by Thorin's voice. All he does is lean forward, and whisper his naked name.

He pries Thorin's hand from around his hips. Thorin stares at him, puzzled, as he brings Thorin's fingers up to his right temple. The skin there folds itself into a scar that falls, ragged, along the bridge of his nose. Thorin sees it in the violets of a sky bleeding into night from a heavy evening, and he can feel it, coarse beneath his fingertips. Dwalin guides Thorin's hand over his eye, he closes them, and then he opens them once Thorin's near his lips.

He grabs his hand and kisses it. Thorin feels as if Dwalin's just opened his chest, just let him dip his fingers inside the blood and flesh underneath,Dwalin's just led him to his beating heart, he's held it out for him, he's made him hold it.

_We are not what they told us we are_ it means. Dwalin knows no other way of saying it, no other way of whispering it than  _here_ ,  _take my heart_ ,  _hold it_ .

Do not break it. Thorin pulls his hands away again. He stands, face to face with Dwalin with a scar that disfigures his face and only makes it more beautiful, and he cups Dwalin's cheek. 

There is a secret that's been spilled, a heart that's been bared. He leans forward, and their foreheads touch, and Dwalin smiles. His eyes are glistening.

It's Thorin's turn to cup his face, to pull him in, to breathe the kiss.

A little death.

 


	16. xv

She cannot exactly pinpoint _why_ but she feels almost as if she's been abandoned. It is-- different, and uncomfortable, and she hates how it makes her bones heavy. Her father's on a business trip and her brother...

Her brother's with his lover, and that lover is a man.

Dis puts her hairbrush down onto her dresser with a little more energy than she knows she should use, and it clinks wood against plastic. She stares at her reflection, wonders if it should stare back, picks at the hair caught in the brush, tears it out, throws it into her wastebasket. She repeats the gesture three times. She sits at the dresser, she worries her lips, hands in her lap. Her room is a quiet thing, echoing through her chest. Her mind is a quiet thing, right now, too. She feels betrayed, in a funny bitter way, children should not feel betrayed like this, but she _does_. Her brother with a man, over and over in her head like the truth of God bestowed upon the unbelieving. Funny how things fester between people, funny how things deepen a bond.

 _Our brother's keeper_.

She stands up and the thing in the mirror moves with her, its shadow attached to her feet like beasts chewing away at her calves. She walks like she were burning, heavy like she didn't walk before, just months earlier. Heaviness that's hatched quickly and festered deeply, and it makes her wander different.

She opens the door to her room and then walks downstairs. Balin is sitting uncomfortably in an armchair in the living room, reading a book. The pitter patter of her slippers against the polished wood of the stairs makes him look up.

“Hello, lass.”

“I didn't know you were already here, sorry.”

He smiles. She lowers her gaze.

“Not a problem, Dee.”

Oh, now _that_ is different.

“Only Frerin calls me Dee.”

“Do you not want me to call you that?”

She shrugs. They are similar, those two, in mannerisms and darkness, and in the colors behind their eyes, but his clockwork is crooked and hers is skewed to the side. Balin feels her nervousness like jagged edges pressing lightly into his skin, leaving dents of worry and uneasiness. They're nothing if not lonely, if not terrified, if not silent. He stands, his index finger marking his place in the book and slips his glasses off.

“What do you two want for dinner?”

“Dunno. Anything. Frerin doesn't like peas in his mashed potatoes.”

“Then I won't put peas in your mashed potatoes.”

He smiles and her lack of cheerfulness doesn't sit right. There's something wrong and amiss, and Balin knows that if he pries he'll meet a wall: he knows children, knew it in Dwalin and in himself and has seen it in Thorin. Most of all, he knows he finds it in Frerin.

That Dis stares at him with eyes too large to not be haunted and a body that's as tense as a trigger about to be squeezed does not sit right with him. Dis slips away, into the kitchen, and she can't shake the thought off from her bones: the sight of Dwalin and Thorin in each other's arms is surprisingly festering, filling her bloodstream with ants that are crawling and eating and never stopping-- they still haven't stopped, in a way that makes her feel like she's about to snap through the middle. She hates it, and hates how she doesn't know what she was before she felt this way, a mix of guilt and fear that seeing Thorin _like that_ only made worse. She fills a glass with water and stares at the tap, snaps out of it, comes back, still feels like the night before was a dream, realizes that processing it was worse than seeing it.

The water calms the hunger pangs enough for the pain to lessen and she doesn't even notice.

She finds Frerin at the stable.

Her hair is waves, Thorin's is straight, their brother's is a mess of curls he never bothers to brush.

Serendipity tosses her head and whinnies as Frerin stops her from the trot and rubs her neck, halting in front of where Dis is leaning against the fence. He smiles at her, riding helmet casting shadows in the creases around his eyes and the slightly crooked front teeth. He climbs off of the horse.

“Walk with us?” he asks, and Dis nods. It's nice, after all, to not need words: it's nice to know there's someone who doesn't need words, there's someone who walks with her same gait, and she rests a hand against Serendipity's side as Frerin leads her by the bridle back to the stable. He is tender with her, delicate hands that run along her muzzle once she's back in her box, voice a rough shade of maroon as he hushes her, quietly, as he smiles. Happy. Empty of the sound and the pain. His sister watches him as he takes Serendipity's saddle off, as he brushes her. She presses her snout against his shoulder and he smiles. “Horses don't ask you to look them in the eye,” he says, unprompted, as he feeds Serendipity a carrot he's just peeled, “they don't ask you to talk.”

“We don't have to talk if you don't want to.”

“I'm not talking about _you_ , Dee.”

He brushes his palm against Serendipity's nose and coos at her when she presses her nose to it.

“I feel angry.”

Dis does the bitter smile she does when she's hurting, where her lips _dip_ , and Frerin feels her pain like a bitter aftertaste. He wipes his hands on his jeans and erases the feeling he's just hurt her the same way he cleanses his palms. He hates being how he is. It makes him _cruel_ , he knows this. _A cruel little boy, you'd break your mother's heart if she could see you_.

“--Angry?” she asks.

“It's fucked up.”

Her eyes widen, and he sneers.

“No, not Thorin and Dwalin, I mean--” he sits on the porch and closes his eyes to the sun. A deep breath, enough to order the thoughts in his head. He opens his eyes to his sister sitting next to him. He smiles, and Dis' lip doesn't quip when she smiles back. “I mean-- I don't know how to wrap my head around it. It feels... it's not _fair_.” Hands sprawled on his knees, he stares at his own knuckles and the veins. “It's not _fair_.” he mumbles.

Laid bare for her and at his most comfortable, when you can see the heart beating through the hole in the ribcage when the sternum's cut out. Dis traces circles in the dirt with her finger.

“He just got up and _left_. Because he felt like it.”

“I don't know, Frer. Maybe he just _needed it_.”

“Well. He's not the only one.”

Her scowl turns to a grimace that she quickly hides behind her hand.

“I mean, if it makes him happy, Frer.”

“Oh, I'm _sure_ it does.”

“Don't say that.”

Frerin's shoulders tighten, sudden and brisk.

“It's the truth, Dee.”

“It doesn't matter. You shouldn't talk like that about him.”

This is how it is: family is heavy and terrible and sticky, like glue beneath your fingers. Family doesn't sit right, no matter which way you look at it, family doesn't let you breathe. Family confuses you, simply put, it doesn't allow you to feel like you're becoming someone that isn't what they've marked you to be. Family isn't how it should be done, and it is the only way. Family makes your hands shake.

“Why not? He's my brother, he's not the bloody queen. He doesn't dictate how I feel and neither does... Thrain.”

A small halting breath where he breaks the bridge between _father_ and _Thrain_. Saying his name strips the man of agency and power. Saying the name makes his teeth a little lighter, his head a little more solid, his hands a little more free. Little steps, little steps to break himself away from the monkey on his back, its bony fingers deep inside his mouth, pressing against his gums and teeth. There's always the risk of a tooth ripping if he tears it off: there's always the thought of free blood being so much sweeter than the taste of bile.

“If I want to feel angry about it, I can.”

“I know.”

He sighs.

“I'm sorry. I don't want to make you feel like you gotta pick sides.”

“I don't. I don't feel that way and I don't feel like I have to pick sides. I'm on--”

She stands up and stretches, the slight contour of shoulder blades moving beneath her shirt and skin.

“I'm on my side. Our side. Whoever's side. There's no _side to pick_ , Frer.”

He looks at her as she turns to look at him and he wishes it were true. There's a firefly like a halo behind her head, and he knows he never wants to see her cry, he knows she's the only good thing about him. Summer's dying like breath in his hands ready to turn to smoke, but after all something's always dying in the back of his head. Always screaming. He wants to hug Dis like the dead man he feels like.

 _You're a thirteen year old boy_ , he has to remind himself. It hasn't felt that way in a bloody damn while.

“...Didn't you have a crush on Dwalin?” he asks. Dis turns bright red and quickly crosses her arms over her chest.

Frerin laughs.

“ _None of your business_.”

He snickers as her ears start burning, red-hot, and she sinks between her shoulders, brow furrowed, eyes avoiding her brother's. She cannot help but see the _irony_ of it, wanting the boy who's going to bed with her brother, but she didn't _know_ , and besides--

“I never expected him to be in my league. _Ever_.”

Frerin opens his mouth to reply (something _witty_ , no doubt) but her gaze silences him. Briskly. He swallows and lowers his head, and instead finds his fingers tracing the circles Dis had traced in the dust beside their feet. She rocks where she's standing and stares at the tip of her shoes until the blushing starts to stop.

“Dad says Thorin's... _finally decided_ to join the army.”

Timing isn't either of their forte, and happiness is hardly ever a constant, and they're the thing that finds the balance in between. Frerin tastes the news between his nose and mouth, and furrows his brow.

“Oh.”

“Makes sense. I mean, Dad did it and Grandfather did it.”

“Well, I won't.”

After he's said it it feels very much like he's just spoken his own death sentence. Dis looks up at him. “Dad won't let you.”

Frerin shrugs, “I'll find a solution. I don't... I don't _want_ to kill people. I don't want to kill anybody. And I especially don't want to kill anybody to make _Thrain_ happy.”

Dis lowers her head for a long, long while this time.

Frerin knows he's said something that's upset her, he can see it in the stillness of her chest and her hiding behind her hair. He tries to peer past her defenses: she opens the gates to let him in anyway.

“I'm so scared. All the time.”

“Of what, Dee?”

“I don't know.”

Her voice says it but it might as well have been his. _Christ, Christ how dare the world hurt you this way_ \-- and he stands in the sweep of a movement. Two children hug and it feels like broken Bible verses. Two children hug and a girl doesn't want to lose her brother, a boy doesn't want to leave his sister. It is sudden, like air being knocked from their lungs, and it is quiet, like every moment that they've ever shared, and it matters sharply like the fact that every snowflake is unique, and no one snowflake is the same, and the ones that fall on your hands will never have a twin.

* * *

Thorin wakes to Dwalin's head on his shoulder and his left arm feeling like a swarm of screaming bees. His neck is aching, he blinks against the sunlight pouring in from the car window. Dwalin doesn't budge. Thorin stares at him: the small smile, the eyelashes fluttering as he sleeps, the mohawk that's a mess where Thorin's fingers had dug into it, the scar, the stubble that shadows his jaw. He's beautiful, and it _hurts_ in his chest like the first day if not stronger. Thorin brushes his fingers along Dwalin's cheek, and Dwalin mumbles in his sleep. He sniffles, and then grabs Thorin's hand suddenly, stilling it.

His eyes open, he squeezes them shut again, he tries to move. A grimace.

“Shit this car is _small_.”

“It is.”

Dwalin groans and tries to decide his next move. He decides to clamber his way up to Thorin and press his lips to his.

“There. Much better.”

Thorin scoffs and cards his fingers through Dwalin's hair. Dwalin purrs and kisses his cheek, closes his eyes and hums.

“You're crushing me, Dwalin.”

Deadpan. They share a stare and then Thorin snorts.

“You _are_.”

“But I'm so _comfy_.”

Thorin makes a face and bends over to reach his shirt, Dwalin moving out of the way and rubbing his face to chase sleep off of it.

“Ah, shit. What time is it?”

“I have no idea.”

Dwalin shakes his head a few times and blinks. “I need coffee.”

“Ask the squirrels, they might have some.”

Thorin grins and laughs when Dwalin shoves him, and then he puts his shirt back on, zips his pants and steps out of the car to pee. Dwalin makes sure he's within earshot and then asks, “Is it a problem if we take a detour?”

“A detour? Did we even have an itinerary?” Thorin calls from behind the bushes.

Dwalin shrugs despite Thorin not even being able to see him, “Dunno. Guess I wanted you to meet my mum?”

A pause. Thorin fidgets with his pants nearly hanging off his ass. “Shit, Dwalin.” he mumbles under his breath. A hand to rub his face, and a sigh. He'd mentioned it the day before and Thorin had thought he's _joking_ , he can't be _serious_ , he can't want to have me meet his mum, that's just--

Ridiculous.

“...Have the squirrels gotten ya?”

“No. No. I mean--”

Another pause.

“No. I'm safe from squirrels.”

He zips his fly up and then trudges back to the car. He closes the door. He sighs and stares at the dashboard. Dwalin taps against the steering wheel and knows not to say anything. One breath at a time, as is always, until Thorin's bones find the distances he has to cross. But then the quiet, as usual, gets a little too loud--

“We don't-- we, I mean, Thorin, there's no-- there's no rush.”

So much for not saying anything.

Thorin stares at him fretting and whispers, very quietly, “Dwalin.”

“It's okay, Thorin, I know better now, I—”

“Dwalin. Let's take the detour. And let's see your mom after that.”

Dwalin blinks.

“What?”

“Let's do that.”

Dwalin swallows and then smiles. It crinkles the skin around his eyes and Thorin can't stop himself from kissing him. Once, twice, and then Dwalin's laughter chases his lips back to Thorin's, “What did I do?”

“You make me _happy_ , Thorin. You make me the happiest I've ever been in my life.”

Thorin runs a knuckle along Dwalin's cheekbone. He's never done this, never done this, never allowed his hands to travel across the cracks and the wonders of Dwalin's face, never lost himself, but something the night before was shattered and put into another place. There's a space now which he can look through, a hole in the bookshelf, a book that's been placed somewhere else. There's a defense that's gone, and a place he can rests his hands in. He does. Until the day he _dies_ , he swears, he will trace the lines of Dwalin's face. He will trace them like threads through a labyrinth, and he will find his way home in the breaths and the cracks.

This must be the place.

“We should get going, then.” Thorin murmurs.

Dwalin pushes his smile to the side and nods, “We are.” and revs the car up.

* * *

“So who are we seeing, anyway?”

Thorin's sitting with his back against the car door, legs crossed. Dwalin glances at him and shrugs, “Just a friend”

“ _Just_ a friend?”

“Important enough to make me want to have you meet them.”

Thorin nods and brings his knees up to his chest. He stares out of the windshield for a little while.

“Who are they?”

“The most important person in my life after you.”

It's enough to make Thorin fall quiet again, head lowered, fingers playing with the hem of his sleeve. Dwalin hates these silences, but he will have to learn to live with them. They come, every once in a while, they come and they rest on the back of Thorin's neck. He sees him, out of the corner of his eye, the quiet divinity of non-responsiveness, as he stares at the countryside rolling past them.

“Am I worth it?”

“Yes.”

Thorin pushes his knees up against his chest as tight as he can, places his chin between them.

“Okay.”

Dwalin doesn't feel like this counts as an answer. Dwalin doesn't feel like it counts as anything worthy at all, like it isn't just a simple word to fill the silence. like it isn't simply quiet in another way.

“You are worth _so much_.”

How many times will he have to say this? How many times will he have to repeat himself, try and fix the mess, try and show Thorin he's worth it? How many times will he have to be a mother and a father to this blue-eyed boy? And yet he can't stop himself from grabbing his hand, and he clutches it, driving with only one hand, until the suburbs of Glasgow come into view.

“Shit. Hold on.”

Dwalin reaches over and opens the glovebox. He rummages past the hand towel, the crumpled cigarette packets, the keys to old doors he cannot even remember, until he finds what he's looking for: a pad of paper. An address is scribbled onto it. Thorin recognizes Dwalin's handwriting.

“Should... you be doing this while driving?”

“Sure. Perfectly safe. Read me the address, love.”

Thorin furrows his brow and reads, “54, Barnbeth Road. Is... is this right?”

Dwalin giggles.

“Oh, she'll _kill me_ when she finds out I can't remember her address by heart anymore.”

“Who _is_ this person?”

Dwalin glances at Thorin, “Her name's Asunn.”

“That... doesn't help me very much.”

“Do not ask me to describe her. I couldn't. She defies all categorization. Besides,” the light turns green and Dwalin smirks, “you'll find out soon enough.”

Thorin rolls his eyes and leans his head against the window. Glasgow cascades by like drizzle and slush. Boys looking at their car with scowls, three girls with knee-high boots and too much eyeliner, shops that are closed, cars parked. He spreads his hand against the window and stares at the world through the spaces between his fingers.

“Shit.” Dwalin suddenly spats at the next red light. He rubs his face with both his hands, presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

“You all right?”

“It's fucking weird to be back, angel. Fucking _weird_.” he sighs as he squints at the street signs, “Fucking bloody weird.”

He grabs the pad and reads the address again.

“I could've read it for you. You're... _driving_.”

“It's all good, Thorin.”

Thorin worries his lower lip for a few seconds. Dwalin swallows.

“You're nervous.”

“Perceptive as always, Sherlock.”

He drums against the steering wheel.

“It's just that I haven't been back. In a.”

And the words sound more choked than they should.

“In a year. After. After the first summer.”

And his voice shouldn't be cracking already.

“Ah. Shit. I'm sorry, Blue Eyes, I'm-- Shit.”

Dwalin wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, “I thought I'd be able to handle this better. Shit.”

“It's okay. You've seen me worse.”

“It's just-- it's _home_ , you know? This is my place.”

Dwalin smiles bitterly as he stops the car near a series of thin houses, white doors, slim windows, pressed together like ribs or blades of grass or pages in a book. He stares at the second one from the left.

“Christ.”

“Why are you doing this, if it scares you so much?”

Dwalin turns towards his boy, “Because I love the shit out of her.”

He sees the light in Thorin's eyes grow dull, “It's _different_ , Blue Eyes. It's not how I love you. I-- she's done a lot for me. She's been there a lot for me. She's... I just want you two to meet, that's all.”

“She terrifies me already.”

Dwalin scoffs, “You and me both. Now, let's just hope she's home.”

Dwalin rings the doorbell. He swallows and buries his hands in his pockets and shuffles his feet. Someone screams “ _Coming_!” muffled from behind the door and Dwalin feels his heart beat loud through his ears. Without thinking he grabs Thorin's hand and finds Oakenshield's sweaty palm grounds him better than anything else in this world.

The door opens, “ _Listen_ , if you're selling something, I don't bloody wan--”

The girl has red hair. Flaming red hair, loosely tied in a braid that falls over her shoulder. As her words are cut short (these two don't _look_ like door to door salesmen after all) she stares at the two in front of her, or better: a quick glance to Thorin and then a surprised, puzzled, narrowed gaze at Dwalin.

“Oh, _bloody hell_.”

Dwalin who clears his throat, “Hey there, Spitfire.”

And then she's jumping and he's stumbling back and she's wrapping her legs around his hips and crushing his neck in his arms. She laughs. Loud.

Dwalin does too, his own arms both holding her up and embracing her.

“You fucking _arsehole_! You bastard! Didn't phone, didn't write, just fucking... just fucking _shows up_!”

“You know how I am.”

“ _An arse_.”

“An arse.”

She disentangles herself from their embrace and makes a face at Dwalin, clenching and unclenching her fists in front of her, “I should _murder_ you. I should--” and then she's glancing back at Thorin, who's trying very hard not to stare. She grins her demeanor shifts, the playfulness in plain air like the sparkle of the freshest snow, “Is this...?”

“None other.”

Dwalin is beaming. Dwalin wraps an arm around Thorin's hip and pulls him close, and Thorin doesn't know how to feel.

Asunn lingers for a moment on her doorstep and then slips back into her house, opening the door wide, “Well then, what're you waiting for? In here, the both of you.”

“Chop chop?”

“Don't tease, MacFundin.”

Dwalin gestures at Thorin, “C'mon, Blue Eyes.”

“ _Blue Eyes_ , right.” Asunn says as she shoves a few magazines off her coffee table and fishes through her cupboard for mugs, “What's your real name, doll?”

Thorin turns around from looking at the engravings hanging on the wall, “Excuse me?”

“ _Your name_ , love.” Asunn says, as she pours scotch into both the mugs and into a plastic cup for herself.

Thorin turns to Dwalin, “You never told her my name?”

“He wrote about you _once_ and then didn't write for what, six months? Seven? And then showed up on my doorstep.”

Dwalin opens his hands in mock apology, “Guilty as charged. You know how I am. I... forgot.”

“I bet you wrote to _him_ everysingle day.”

“More like once or twice a week.”

Dwalin turns towards Thorin, “You _wound me_. I thought you were on my side.”

Asunn smiles, “Oh. I _like him_ already.” as she rams a mug into each of their hands. Thorin furrows his brow at the alcohol.

“It's ten in the morning.”

“And we have something to celebrate.” the girl replies, sitting down on the couch.

Thorin tilts his head and sort of nods. He sets the mug down on a shelf and stares at the book titles instead. Much better, less distracting. _Definitely_ less absurd. “Anyway, my name's Thorin.” he mumbles.

She scoffs and then laughs, “What? Like that Oakenshield chap?”

Thorin stares at Dwalin who exhales slowly and leans back against the couch.

“ _You didn't_ \--”

“...didn't what?” Asunn asks, glancing from one to the other and then again.

“Uh. He--”

Thorin outstretches a hand at Asunn before Dwalin can finish.

“Thorin Charles Oakenshield. At your... service, I guess.”

He's grinning, and doesn't exactly know why. Maybe it's because he's terrified.

Asunn stares at the hand and then up at Thorin, then turns to Dwalin, and then bursts out laughing.

“ _No_.”

She doesn't take Thorin's hand and instead concentrates on Dwalin, her eyes wide and her smile wider.

“You're _shitting_ me.”

“Asunn--”

“Didn't you _work_ for his dad? Aren't you _not supposed_ to... bed your boss?”

“He's not my boss, his father is. Sometimes.”

She turns back to Thorin, “You're _filthy rich_ , kid.”

Thorin blinks and then replies, “I _have been_ made aware of that, occasionally. Sometimes. People tend to notice.”

“Stop encouraging his sarcasm, Asunn.”

Asunn laughs loud enough to snort and she quickly brings a hand up to her face. Thorin swallows, and smiles, and glances over at Dwalin, who's sitting at a strange angle on the edge of the sofa and doesn't look like he's enjoying the conversation that much, something amiss in the eyes, something that doesn't have to be constrained by the way the words bounce but still there's the bare bones that have to be traced, and he isn't liking the way the conversation is going. Still he smiles, and that's what keeps the world spinning on its hinges. Thorin takes his cup to the kitchen and feels the rattle in his bones that usually happens when he starts feeling shame. Not so good, not so right, a slippery slope that starts with his mind whispering that _he_ 's not good and _he_ 's not right.

Yet the most important person in Dwalin's life didn't know his name.

Behind him, Asunn watches him go, creep into the small kitchen with his hands clutching a mug full of scotch he won't drink.

“Does he at least kiss well?”

“He's shy.”

“I can _see_ that.” she quips, her smile infectious until her gaze reaches Dwalin's face.

“...What's wrong?”

“It's all right.”

“No it's not. Tell me.”

He frowns and she frowns harder.

“Does it have to do with the fact he's an Oakenshield?”

“Sort of. I guess.”

“Does it have to do with the fact you didn't want to tell me his name?”

Thorin comes back and the conversation falls quiet and sits on their faces as clear as day. He knows better than to ask questions. He doesn't know if he feels comfortable yet or not, or if he's wondering if he feels comfortable just because he doesn't want to feel uncomfortable, because he knows that feeling uncomfortable would disappoint Dwalin, but this isn't something (whatever the this is which is a truth that's starting to dawn on him quicker and quicker and quicker) that makes him sit easy. He feels like anywhere he leans, there's shards of glass pressing enough to make his skin itch and crawl.

“Not much of a drinker are you, love?” Asunn smiles at his now empty hands.

“It's eleven AM.”

She takes a sip from her glass and almost looks like she wants to prove a point, “Fair enough. Am I confirming all your stereotypes about drunk Scotsmen? Or, well, Scottish lasses? I'm sure Dwalin's done enough to confirm all the stereotypes _he_ can.”

Thorin shrugs, “You said there was something to celebrate. I don't have anything against that.”

Dwalin feels the edge in Thorin's voice and the way he glances at him, and he feels the target of annoyance. Uncomfortable. He feels with Thorin things he's never felt, the crisp sudden breeze of long term relationships, where you have time to get angry and you have time to get frustrated and you have time to argue and fight and upset one another and everything is very real and very in delicate balance, constantly, but also certain: words can sever bonds but there's always the thought that they might come back because sometimes love is stronger than arguments. Still, Thorin steeples his fingers together and doesn't budge. A few seconds multiplied by a thousand in thought. Dwalin moves his attention to Asunn, who's still talking, rushing to lift them both from the thorns they're sharing with gazes.

“So what plans do you have for today? Apart from visiting me, of course.”

“Haven't seen mum in a while.”

“Oh, she'll be _glad_. How's Balin?”

“He's... all right, I guess.”

“Still give him a good headache?”

Too close, too familiar, too _there_ : Balin standing in front of him while he carded his fingers through Thorin's hair, the boy's head on his lap. _You act like he gave me a choice_ , and the rage that had followed that night.

“In... a way.”

Asunn narrows her eyes. Something's wrong, in the way they act around each other, in the way there's something amiss but also something so utterly overpowering. She wants to ask Dwalin a million questions, but feels like she can't with Thorin around, something tells her personal matters aren't left in the open to macerate in the heat of the sun. Something in the way Dwalin doesn't seem right in his skin.

“Dwalin, help me with the mugs?” she asks, abruptly standing. She waves at Thorin to stay, and Dwalin looks at her, puzzled for a second, and then shrugs. “Sure.”

She turns to him when he fumbles behind her to reach the sink and pries the cup out of his hand.

“What's going on, Dwalin?”

The door's ajar and Dwalin glances towards it to see Thorin in the crack of light from the living room, nosing the books on her shelf. It makes his heart constrict violently, and he looks back at her, and realizes there's a pit in his chest and it's so big he doesn't know how to put it into words. He gapes. Asunn arches an eyebrow, “I've never seen you like this. I'd say you're fucking lovestruck, MacFundin, but this is something _worse_.”

“It's-- it's complicated.”

“Try me. You've thrown worse at me.”

Her hand delicately brushes along his cheek, and he does not brush it off when she reaches the scar. He sighs.

“You always know what to say.”

“Well, if you were _normal_ , you'd be dating me by now.”

“Arse.”

“For you? Always. Now spill the beans.”

Another glance to the side. Thorin's slipped out of view and he can't do anything but look back at Asunn.

“I've never felt this way.”

“Well, that much is clear.”

“No, Asunn it's-- it's fucking _insane_. I've never felt this way. For _anyone_. For any reason. It's scary as shit.”

She giggles, “Yeah.”

“No, no, no, there's so _much_ Asunn, there's just-- I mean. He fucking _hates_ himself, hates himself for being gay, hates himself because he can't give his fucking father what he considers a _perfect son_ , Asunn, he asked me if he was _worthy_ of meeting you.”

“Well if it's of any consolation, I consider _you_ worthy of meeting me, so--”

“Asunn, he's a mess and I don't know how to fix him.”

“Oh, _bloody hell--_ ”

He missed this, missed these hushed whispers and feeling open with someone, feeling like he can unload every hurt without the fear of hurting someone else, the solid security of knowing he's not alone, a thing he's been trying to give Thorin but if there's no _breach in the walls to begin with_ , if there's no way of _burning it down to get inside_ there can be no dialogue, no talking, no nothing-- there's just blue eyes and his screaming terror at the sight of them.

“--Asunn, I _love him_.”

It is the fracture in his voice that makes her pause, that makes her stagger, that makes her sigh, slow and small, and smile sad.

“Do _not_ set yourself on fire to keep him warm, MacFundin, you _dipshit_. Do _not_.”

“But I love him.”

“That's not an excuse. You can't ruin yourself for the sake of someone else.”

He swallows and sighs again and then, very quietly, “I gave him a gift. An earring. His father found out and I've never seen anyone _so scared_ , Spitfire, I've never--”

She grabs both his hands, “Then _help him_. But don't tell yourself you can _save him_.”

He didn't think it weighed this much. He didn't think he hadn't stopped to breathe and look at it from afar, he didn't think it bared down upon him this _bad_ , bad enough to not know what to say or do, bad enough to love him too much for him to handle.

Thorin sits at the piano bench and stares at the keys. He can't tell if it's tuned or not without playing, and he doesn't want to bother them, doesn't want to intrude with his presence. Still his hands itch, because that's what happens when there's too much quiet. He presses the first key slowly, so that it makes no sound and simply thumps against the wood and thumps again when he releases it just as slow. An arpeggio played softly, without anyone hearing, ghosts of the ways he used to heal himself before he found that cauterizing wounds in the body of another boy worked just as well.

He tries to play a scale: the piano is definitely out of tune, not too much, though, not enough to crumple the music before it's even played. He glances up at the kitchen door and sees it still ajar, still hears their whispering and catches his name, and the word _father_ and _gay_ and knows suddenly that he will need to drown them out before the shame comes back full force.

So much for being fucking _brave_ and eloping to Scotland without much of an afterthought.

“God you're fucked, MacFundin.”

Dwalin can't place if it's humor or despair. Asunn's staring at him, stern. The tip of her nose trembles slightly, it happens when she's confused or angry or scared, and it's done so ever since she was a child.

“Does he even know what he's done to you?”

“He does.”

He knows it in all the times he's caught him staring when he thought Dwalin was sleeping, in the eyes and the tremble of his hands.

“He wouldn't be this scared if he didn't love me back.”

The piano playing starts quietly, almost falling on the final beat of Dwalin's last sentence, a cliché if there's ever been one. Asunn's eyes widen and Dwalin opens the door to the kitchen. She sees him stop in his tracks, and she sees him _smile_ , and when she sees the way her friend's eyes shine the anxiousness in her chest settles. There's something magical in the light of them, in the wonder, like he's seen the most beautiful sunset and it's just a thin London boy playing on her father's out of tune piano.

She peeks in too.

“Well, you've sure got a knack for it, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin stops playing abruptly, and his eyes are wide and his hands snap back away from the keys. And then he sees Dwalin smile, and _he smiles back_.

“Oh.” Asunn mumbles. She glares back at Dwalin, then at Thorin, and then sighs.

“ _Idiots_ ,” she murmurs.

“Pretty much,” Dwalin replies and then adds, “That was... really nice.”

Thorin giggles, music and Dwalin's _stupid_ , _fucking_ smile having restored balance to the ticking of his chest, “Thank you.”

Asunn sighs. There's enough contradictions in all this to write pages upon pages upon pages, and she tells herself not to be _scared_ , and if they keep each other afloat, if in the madness of the world they've found each other, if they can _smile like that_ at each other-- then shit. Maybe it isn't so bad after all.

“Well. We need food for lunch. So, I'm going to the shops.”

“There's, no need-”

“Bull fucking shit, MacFundin. Celebration, remember? So. Food.”

She flashes a grin at him, and then to Thorin--

“Blue Eyes, how 'bout y'come too?”

“I can't drive.”

Asunn snorts, “Shop's around the corner. Just want company.”

“How 'bout me?”

Asunn opens the door, “Dwalin, _you're cooking_. Has he ever cooked for you?”

Thorin shakes his head, standing between Asunn and the door and Dwalin and the rest of the house.

“ _Dwalin_. Shame on you. Well, he's a pretty good bloody cook. Off we go, Blue Eyes. Chop chop.”

She ushers Thorin out the front door. It slams closed behind them with a merry bang, and Asunn grins. Thorin swallows, still confused about what's just happened, still terrified about having to spend time with Asunn, who he doesn't know, at all, he's just met her, she's Dwalin's best friend, and he doesn't _know her_ \--

He buries his hands in his pants pockets and follows her meekly down the road, cross the street. The walk is longer than he expected.

“Did you bring me along just to lug groceries?”

“Maybe.” she says, as they reach the small store and she smiles. She's always smiling, always grinning, and she winks at Thorin, who holds the door open for her. As she's closely examining a can of soup, he reads the labels off the packets of crisps on the shelf directly above her head.

“So.”

“What is it, Blue Eyes?”

“I don't think Dwalin'll make that great a meal with just a. Well. Just a can of soup.”

“This is my week's worth of shopping, Blue Eyes.”

“Oh.”

She picks two tomato basil ones and a chicken and rice one. “Are you always this talkative?”

He blinks at her.

“Only when I'm--”

“Nervous?”

A small annoyed scowl that only makes Asunn grin wider, and he mumbles, “Yeah. Nervous.”

She moves over to the vegetables. The salad looks spent, the broccoli little better. She settles on a handful of carrots and some kale.

“So what'd you think of him, Blue Eyes?”

Thorin stops staring at the crisps and stares at her, blank faced, “Is this where you give me the shovel talk?”

She scoffs, amused, “No, Blue Eyes, this ain't where I give you the bloody shovel talk. Just askin'.”

“Weren't you talking about me earlier?”

She ponders over eggs, “Eggs or meat? Ah, fuck it. Sure, we were.”

“Am I supposed to answer? Eggs.”

She picks the frozen chicken breasts and smiles even wider, “You're not as shy as you'd like to show. Or _think_.”

“Believe me, I am.”

A small shake of her head, “Nah. You've got what it takes, Oakenshield. He wouldn't have fallen in love with you if y'hadn't. Grab the margarine for me, love.”

Thorin complies.

“He's-- he's--”

“What? No punks in the Carthusians?”

“Eton College, actually. Berkshire.”

“Oh, _excuse me_ ,” she frowns at a carton of milk and then puts it down with a sigh, “ _Shit_ you're fancy.”

Thorin turns around from awkwardly staring at the clerk at the counter, “I didn't know milk could be fancy.”

Asunn makes a face at which Thorin's smile expands across his face like ink in water. Asunn arches an eyebrow.

“You know, you ain't even that shabby. Should smile more an' stop looking so _worried_ all the time.”

The earring the tears his father, _Asunn, his father_ \-- scrap that, then. He might have a reason.

Asunn turns away from him and down another aisle, past the dishwasher soap in the small cramped shop. She stops to think.

“What wine d'you drink?” she calls over her shoulder as he stumbles after her.

“I don't-- I mean. Last time I drank, it was a Chateau Lafite Rothschild from 1976.”

“Right. Of course.”

Asunn picks a bottle at random, costing less than eight pounds.

“You don't have to buy us wine.”

“But I _want_ to buy you two wine. You still haven't answered my question.”

How can he explain it? How can he tell a stranger? Sit down and take her hand and say, _See, he's the world and the light and my life_. He's the breath through my lungs. He's my sanity. He's a smile and so much more, and he's-- he's _insane_ and he's _mine_ and I've never felt more whole or healthy or _real_ than when I'm with him. He's everything. He's the point of it all. But it's so _scary_ \-- I've been taught it's wrong, all my life, and I _know_ that I can't tell a soul, he's a secret, he's my heart, he's my heart, he's--

“He's the point of it all.”

Asunn blinks at him. Her eyes don't hold any derisive gazes, no colors sharpened to prick at him. She's taken aback, for a second, and she smiles. Warm and relieved. Thorin furrows his brow at it, but before he can speak she's turned again, seems torn between chocolate wafers and a pack of chocolate biscuits.

“The wafers.”

“Don't break his heart.”

Not exactly the kind of conversation you'd have in front of packets of biscuits.

“I don't want to.”

“ _Want_ and _can't_ are two different things, Thorin. He's given you the biggest gift he could.”

Hands in the dark, that grapple, that search, hands that find the tips of wings, hands that touch, hands, hands that find the shining light of beauty through scars and tears and broken words crushed beneath heels.

“Asunn. He is _everything_.”

The point of it all. His voice bends in on itself in the weight of what it's just said right as they reach the cashier. The old man shares a glance between them, first on Asunn's face with her wide eyes so serious they're made of grey stone and the weight of smog clouds, her mouth trembling with all the words she thinks she should say, and then Thorin-- Thorin whose eyes have had the upper layer torn clean off, bleeding blue from the hole in the surface. He takes Asunn's money wordlessly and mumbles a “Good day” as Thorin grabs the bag and holds the door for her.

They start the walk back in silence, Asunn's shoulders tight and Thorin rolling the words in the front of his head between his eyes, where his skull's the least empty and the syllables are less cavernous in the way they make his heart rate crawl up his windpipe like a cat sinking its nails into your thigh. He sniffles, trudging a few steps behind her, until she stops in front of the door, and turns.

“You're good shit, Thorin.”

He stares at her, wide eyed.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“You can be sure it bloody is.”

Dwalin's sitting at the piano reading something. He looks up at the two coming inside, “Glad t'see you're both still alive. What did you get?”

“Carrots, kale, chicken.”

“And wine.”

“And wine.”

He slips a hand around Thorin's hip to welcome him back and Thorin pulls back sudden, briskly, before Dwalin can kiss him. Dwalin looks away and peels himself from Thorin wordlessly and quickly. He smiles at Asunn, clasps his hands and rolls his sleeves up. Asunn doesn't say a word, either, Thorin follows them into the kitchen.

“We won't all fit.” is Dwalin's comment. A hiccup in the road, a small flinch, and here they are. Asunn sees them wax and wane like rivers searching for land, away and close again and away again. A dance. _Asunn, I love him_. _He is everything_.

Thorin wanders back inside the living room, and Asunn follows.

“I'll just let him work in peace. He likes it better that way.”

Thorin nods and keeps on hugging his elbows. She shakes her head, “He gets annoyed sometimes. You should--”

“I know. It's not the first time.”

Dwalin overhears and clenches a fist over the carrots he's peeling. He sighs.

Asunn smiles at the boy, tries to reassure him, “So. How old're you?”

“Eighteen.”

“So you're in Eton no more, hey? What're you gonna do now?”

Dwalin closes his eyes.

“Well, my dad's a Major General, and my grandfather was knighted for his services, so--”

He closes the door because he doesn't want to hear. Asunn and Thorin turn towards the noise, and then Thorin continues. Tentative, now, and the sound of the door's torn a hole in his heart.

“So yeah. That's what I'm planning on doing.”

“And what does Dwalin think of it?”

She knows the answer, she's heard the door slam shut, and she doesn't let Thorin say it. _I told you not to break his heart_ , she nearly says. But she doesn't know him well enough, not yet at least, so she just stands up, her mouth soured ever so slightly.

“Right. Well. Help me set, Blue Eyes.”

The chicken is, surprisingly enough, delicious. Dwalin beams when Thorin says as much, and Thorin's heart flutters in relief to see his face void of anger. There's no clouds. He wishes he had the courage to kiss it in front of Asunn.

The wine tastes nice enough.

Asunn leans back in her chair.

“Have you ever told him about the time you threw yourself into the Levern?”

Dwalin frowns at her, “That's _private_.”

“All right, so. Winter, 1979. Middle of fucking January, an'Dwalin's _piss off_ drunk. You've ever seen him _pissed_? Well, it's a bloody spectacle.”

“Asunn.”

She smirks, “ _Right_. So he's pissed, screaming what he always screams when he's drunk, that'll kill his father or whatever-”

“ _Asunn_ ,” he says, a little harsher, as he lights himself a cigarette. He offers one to Thorin, who takes it, and for a moment Dwalin stares at the way Thorin's fingers curl around the lighter, the way he inhales, and exhales, and the smoke crawls its way out of his throat. He reaches across the table for Thorin's hand. Thorin doesn't move his, lets Dwalin's fingers find his, lets them sit with Dwalin's hand covering his. A small quivering breath in Dwalin's lungs.

“Well. I'm drunk too, and so's everyone else in our group. We're kids, right? We're stupid. Not that we're any smarter now, but--”

Thorin giggles, and curls his hand around his mouth to muffle it.

“So Gavin turns, and he's fucking _grinning_ like a loon, and he looks MacFundin square in th'bloody face and says, 'I bet you ain't got the balls t'jump.' So of course Dwalin says, 'I do.'--”

“Right, we don't have to tell the whole story.”

“An' he takes his jacket off, an' hands it to me. That means he _means it_.”

Dwalin exhales through his nose. Thorin glances over at him and smiles. Dwalin frowns and rolls his eyes.

“And he climbs up on the wall that keeps stupid fucking asses like him from falling into the river. An' mind you, this is bloody Jan, right? So he climbs, slips a few times, an'then makes it up. He screams, 'cause Dwalin's an idiot. And then-- and then--”

“He slipped.”

She winks at Thorin as she's pointing at him, finger guns, “Oh _yes_ he did.”

Thorin laughs, loud, both hands to his face, ash fluttering through the air and Asunn starts laughing too. Dwalin mumbles, “You haven't told the _best part_ yet, Asunn. C'mon. C'mon.”

“Right. It's winter, so there's ice, so it's hard as fuck. So he broke his fucking ass.”

Thorin starts laughing even harder.

“ _Oh. My God_. You broke your ass.”

Dwalin pours himself a little wine.

“Hilarious, really. Yes, I _did_. I did, I did. I couldn't sit straight for a while. Not that _you're_ not used to that, Blue Eyes.”

A blush that grabs him up the neck, that silences the smile and the sound. Thorin swallows and his hands stop shining.

 _There_ , _MacFundin. You killed it_.

“It was a _joke_.”

“I know.”

Asunn wipes her mouth with her napkin and chirps, “Dwalin, stop drinking, you gotta drive.”

“Cotrìona lives three blocks down, I'm not bloody driving.”

She pries the glass from his hand, “You're not meeting your mum _drunk_.” she giggles, “Speaking of which, you should get going. It's almost two.”

“Are you _kicking us out_?” Dwalin mocks a wounded heart, presses his hand to his chest in disdain.

“Of course I am. I can handle staring at ya only a few hours at a time.”

Thorin hops up quick to help her clear the table. She bats his hands away but he insists. He smiles at Dwalin as Dwalin hands him the plates. Disarming, every time, like a kick to the guts. Dwalin gives Thorin's hand a squeeze. Once they're done, and Asunn's made it clear she's going to do the dishes on her own, once they're done and Thorin's accepted he'll be floating for the rest of the day (it's all so strange, to live and be lived so differently than usual), when Dwalin grabs his sweatshirt and zips it shut and kisses Asunn on the cheek and she murmurs, “Don't be a stranger, MacFundin.”, when they're out on the curb and the door's closed behind them and Dwalin's opening the car to grab his rucksack and Thorin's small suitcase, it's then that Thorin asks, and it thaws his heart like the words in the back of his pocket, the little _I love you_ 's and the little rages and the hopes,

“Are you _embarrassed_ that I'm an Oakenshield?”

“So that's what it was.”

“I'm serious.”

“I am too. You didn't kiss me in front of Asunn.”

They move away from in front of Asunn's house. 

Dwalin doesn't answer, not at first, because honesty takes time to be constructed. He turns to walk backwards, to look at Thorin, to see his face and not feel like he's screaming at nothing. A gesture that takes it all in: the houses, the road with their potholes, the bright blue summer sky.

“This isn't exactly _fancy_.”

“You think it matters? You think I _care_?”

“I'm _betraying them_ , Thorin. I'm betraying every piss poor asshole that's ever lied in his own puke in this street--”

“Because you _love me_?”

“Because your _shit_ could buy this neighborhood. Because your dad has fucking, fucking _cars_ , and you own _horses_. And your _house_ , Jesus.”

Thorin stops and Dwalin does too. “You're being unfair, Dwalin.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. That still don't mean I'm not feeling the way I am.”

“It doesn't make sense. I couldn't choose where or how I was born!”

“Well I never said I'd make _sense_! I'm sorry, all right? I was embarrassed.”

He raises his voice. The man walking down the street changes sidewalk side.

Thorin sighs, clutching the handle of his suitcase with both hands. “Don't do it again. I already have enough things to feel guilty about.”

Dwalin sighs and rubs his temples with both fingers.

“Sorry.”

“It's all good.”

A shaking chuckle where things won't heal themselves.

“Let's go meet your mum.”

“I'm scared of that too.”

Thorin shrugs, and gives Dwalin a smile where he can't hold his hand.

“I'm right here.” 

* * *

Three flights of stairs, the door found open thanks to a woman that'd just stepped out to walk her dog.

Dwalin stands in front of the door.

“I don't know why I'm scared. I talked to her on the phone last week.”

“You haven't seen her in ages. Makes sense.”

A _mother_. There's something new, something he thought he'd stopped being used to. Something Thorin had thought would stop hurting, acute and severe and sharp, through his chest via his throat and tongue.

Dwalin sighs, a deep breath.

“You know I love you, right?”

“I love you too.”

“Please never stop saying that.”

Thorin subtly shakes his head.

“I won't.”

And then Dwalin knocks.

The woman who opens is short. Thorin feels the anxiety hit him once, all together, only Dwalin's already speaking.

“Halò, mamaidh.” he mumbles.

Cotrìona Bateson smiles and cries out her son's name, loud, “ _DWALIN_!” and when his mother hugs him, small enough to safely press her face to his chest, Dwalin MacFundin looks like he's just found his way back home after forty years in the desert, and more.

Thorin feels the hiccup through his hands, and holds his suitcase tighter. Then Cotrìona looks up, clasping her son on the arm, still smiling, until she turns her attention to Thorin. Thorin swallows.

“Hullo.” he mumbles.

“ _Thorin_.”

She says his name as if she's known him all his life.

“You-- know my name.”

“Of _course_ I do. Come on in, both of you.”

“And you... know _about_ me.”

He glances to Dwalin, who's just placed his rucksack on the couch, “Mamaidh, it's fine, we just saw Asunn, we don't need a snack.”

She puts the bag of crisps down, “Asunn? Saw her the other day. She's fine, she says. Mum's been elected to city council.”

“She didn't tell me that. She'll be _thrilled_ , I'm sure.”

The sarcasm is too heavy not to pass unnoticed.

“Must've forgotten given all the _excitement_.”

Thorin's standing awkwardly in the middle of the living room. A look at Dwalin, and then at Cotrìona.

“Come on, give me your suitcase. Oh, I'll have to put you in your old room, Dwalin. Will you both fit on the bed? You should have _warned_ , why didn't you _warn_?”

“Sorry, ma.”

Thorin's eyes widen, “She-- she--”

“Of course she does.”

Curt and quick, “She's my mother.”

And the difference makes Thorin want to scream. It is, like all things bitter, sudden and painful. He swallows.

“Mrs. MacFundin?”

“Oh, no no no, dear.”

Cotrìona emerges carrying sheets and pillows, “It's Cotrìona Bateson.”

“Mum doesn't share Ian's last name. Just me an' Balin.”

Thorin feels like he's about to disappear. He wipes his hands on his jeans.

“May I, uh, have a glass of water?”

“Dwalin?”

“If I still remember where the glasses are.” he grins. His mother tuts, and Thorin follows.

“I hope you're fine with tap.”

“I am. She knows about us, Dwalin. _Dwalin_.”

“So she does.”

“And she--”

“Accepts it? More or less. She's one of those 'I don't understand but as long as you're happy' kind of people.”

The thought is so foreign Thorin _laughs_ , staring at the water in his glass.

“Hey,” Dwalin says, a finger beneath Thorin's chin to make him look at him. It still makes Thorin quiver. He knows it always will.

“Boys, the bed's ready if you want to rest.”

“We're all good, Cotrìona.”

She frowns at her son using her name, and then grins.

“But sit down, Thorin, please, _please_.”

Dwalin sits next to him at the table, Thorin running a finger along the plastic table cloth. She sits across from them.

“You've lost weight, Dwalin.”

“Honest to God, mamaidh, I haven't.”

“Has Balin been feeding you?”

“He has.”

“An' you, you're just a bag of bones.”

Thorin sighs and places his hands beneath his thighs, “I. Guess so.”

He's sitting at a table and his lover's mother is commenting on his weight. This is, surreal. He's in Scotland and his father doesn't know. This is, surreal. He's in love with a man, he's being open about being loved by a man, he's sitting at a table and this is, surreal.

“No worries, ma. Thorin's joining the army. He'll bulk up in no time.”

 _Let it go, please, **let it go** _ , Thorin thinks, rolling his eyes and smiling awkwardly when Dwalin pats him harshly on the back. Dwalin's is a smile that leaves little room to breathe, and he curses it. He curses it every step of the way.

“The army?”

A small nod, “Father's a Major General.”

“Thrain Oakenshield, yes?”

A flinch. He wishes it hadn't racked through him the way he did, “Yeah.”

“Saw him in the news a while back.”

Cotrìona lights herself a cigarette.

“You shouldn't smoke, Cotrìona.”

“Don't talk to your mother like that, Dwalin.”

Thorin snorts without wanting it, a hand to his face to cover the smile.

“Don't do that, angel, you're so pretty when you smile.”

Thorin shifts in his seat, suddenly embarrassed. He shakes his head slightly and the smile turns to a smirk, wide eyed. Dwalin's eyes are burning: he's home with the boy he loves, his mother's all right, happier than when he left, she looks, hopefully she _is_ , hopefully.

“Hopefully Dwalin'll put some meat on your bones.”

Thorin's small giggle racks his shoulders like a sob, “Hopefully.”

“Would you like to see Dwalin's old room?”

“ _Ma_.”

She winks at her son, “He'll see it anyway, maybe if I show it to him he'll actually pay attention.”

“Ma!”

Oh _this isn't a parent_ \-- this isn't a parent like he knows them, either dead or dying, either cold or distant, either grey or underground. Cotrìona leads Thorin down the narrow hallway, past the bathroom and what he imagines is Balin's room, past her bedroom which is closed.

Dwalin's room is-- it's exactly how he'd imagined it.

A band poster plastered to the wall, leaflets and flyers still there, books thrown in the corner, a guitar. The bed is freshly made, Thorin's suitcase sitting on it.

“You play?” Thorin asks.

“A little,” Dwalin answers from behind his mother. She looks up at her son and smiles. He gives her a glance that asks, _approved_? and she nods, and that's that.

“I won't play, though.”

“But you should!”

“Oh, you _really should_ , Dwals.”

The boy stares at the two, “Nope, I'm not good enough.”

“I played for _you_.”

Dwalin wags a finger, “Doesn't matter. I'm not playing.”

Thorin brushes the hair out of his face, “All right, don't worry. Don't worry.”

“Well, I'll get the tea ready-”

“Please, Co-- can I call you by your name?”

She _beams_ at Thorin, “Of course you can, boy.”

“Honestly, Cotrìona, there's no need.”

“You're a _guest_. You're Dwalin's boy.”

“I'm-- I'm--”

Thorin gulps. And then grins.

“I guess I am.”

When Cotrìona leaves he laughs. Loud, with his face buried in his hands. Dwalin's own are in his pockets, as he wobbles up to Thorin. The room's just the same as he's left it.

The bed's too small to fit them both.

“What's so funny?”

“That isn't a mum.”

“What do you mean?”

“That isn't a parent. Parents are, are-- they're sullen, and serious, and they don't make jabs at your sex life.”

Dwalin grins like a loon and grabs Thorin's hands, both of them, gilded in gold, gracious glory.

“I must've come outta somewhere.”

“You're a _loony_. Lord, this has been terrifying.”

“Say that again.”

“What?”

“Call me a loony again.”

Thorin scrunches his nose, “Why?”

“Because when you say it I almost believe it.”

“You jumped off a bridge onto solid ice. You _are_ a loony.”

“But you make it sound like it's the only good thing in this world.”

* * *

He steps into the room and it has a salty smell, a dark smell, the kind of smell the things you aren't supposed to know or acknowledge have, like death and dreams and kissing under the rain when you're a little too drunk. Like poetry spewed out through clenched teeth, but the room still somehow smells of roses which is a miracle in itself.

He is eleven years of age, going on twelve, and he is standing with the door cracked open an inch, and he is staring at the darkness hoping it will eat him whole. And he cannot move, and his mouth tastes a little wrong, a little bitter.

And he is eleven years old.

“Thorin?” his mother asks.

“Can I stay?” he asks back. Her voice is dug out of rock, feeble and not actually there. For a second he tricks himself into a dream he can't control and feels better, but his body asks him back almost instantly. He is only eleven, he doesn't have the willpower to stay away.

(He will find it, at fourteen at seventeen at twenty-three and at thirty-seven it will take him away and he will never truly come back).

“Of course you can, Thorin.”

Her voice feigns sweetness and honey, but pain seeps in between the delicate golden film of intentions coating her words: they're tainted black, they're tainted rotten. They're tainted in a way no boy should ever have to listen to. They're tainted in such a way that they'll make him cry in ten years' time, when he will be in love and curled up at the bottom of nothing, a safe haven made of dust and cigarettes.

Thorin Charles Oakenshield crawls towards his dying, pancreatic cancer ridden mother and feels the first ghost of emptiness stop him in his tracks, a breathless moment.

That's the darkness.

It doesn't matter that she can't see him: the way the door's nearly shut behind him makes it so all the light there is is a single stiletto blade tearing through his back and through his hands, in ten years' time he'll wish for them to bleed, in ten years' time he'll hide himself amongst the shattered remains of a sense of self.

Right now, he is eleven years old. He nestles his face against her side, feels the ribs through the night gown and dressing gown and breathes, small, her scent not only smelling of something that is dying.

“My little serious boy,” Valerie whispers. He clings to the sound like a madman as her fingers run through his hair.

“My little serious boy.”

Thorin opens his eyes and there's a ceiling he does not and cannot recognize. Breathing, to his sight, heavy not with sickness but with it being Dwalin, Thorin's shoulders to the wall, Dwalin's back to him.

He tries to breathe: he can't. He tries to move: he can, only slowly, and he pries himself from the heat of Dwalin's small childhood bed and his feet find the floor. He can barely see in the light coming in from the window: still, it's enough, and he finds that if he sits on the windowsill and pulls himself close there's no risk of falling.

Streetlights flicker through the summer darkness, a car drives by and traces the contours of shadows on his hands. It's so much less quiet than the countryside, and he would find it invigorating, only something's _screaming_ in his chest begging for murder, and he can't seem to stop it, or freeze it, or make it so he can breathe in any way.

 _My little serious boy_.

He hadn't thought about her this badly in _months_ , hadn't missed her so viciously and violently in _months_ , hadn't felt her absence like the everlasting constant presence of drowning light, shone straight into his eyes, no way of fleeing, only sound and scream and light, and light, and light.

He presses his head to the glass, presses his hand to it too, and through the corner of his eye he sees it fogged by his breathing, but it isn't _enough_ , she smelled of roses and she smiled as if the whole world was her answer, she smelled of roses, of roses, _of roses_.

“Thorin?”

“Have I been sobbing out loud?”

Dwalin's leaning against his elbows in the semidarkness, the contour of a bare chest, the slight sketch of a worried expression.

“A little. Is everything all right?”

“I-- _I miss my mum_.”

He doesn't think he's ever said it out loud.

“Oh. _Oh_. Thorin.”

Dwalin's outstretching his hand. He won't let him cross this stream alone. He won't let him burn at night in solitude. He won't, he can't, cannot, does not want to allow it.

“Come here, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin feels like he is crawling across the room.

“I'm sorry.”

“Tell me about her.”

“About Valerie?”

“That's her name? Was.”

“Yeah. Valerie Longbeard.”

“And what did she like?”

“She had a rose garden.”

Dwalin feels Thorin's voice quiver like nails against chalk.

“And what else?”

“I remember her smell, and... Dwalin, Dwalin Lord I can't do this.”

“Okay. I'm sorry.”

“If she were still alive I would be _happy_.”

Arms around him like a safety anchor, like a light, like a lighthouse at the end of the lane, like hope, like hope, like peace. _I'm here_.

“I'm sorry it's just been-- it's been _hard_.”

“My mum's still alive?”

“She's so different from Father, Dwalin.”

A pause. Thorin feels Dwalin's lips press to his cheeks, to his cheekbones. They kiss the tears away, like pearls, like stars.

“I know.”

Her hands through his hair like promises, her smile, her laughter. Not tonight, not like this, not so painfully like the empty deep in his chest that starts, like a cavern, where his heart is and then grows slicker, and thinner, and sharper, a jab of pain through his stomach. There's so much emptiness, there's so much heartbreak he cannot seem to heal.

“Earlier, you spoke Gaelic?”

“Yeah, Blue Eyes.”

“Mamaidh.”

“It means mother.”

“That much I gathered. It's beautiful. _You're_ beautiful, you say it beautifully. Can you say some more?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything, anything, anything.”

 _Just fill the empty please_. His mother is dead. It hits him like the darkness ever approaching-- there's so much she's missed. There's so much she never saw.

“She would've loved you, Dwalin.”

“A bheil thu 'g iarraidh a dhanns?”

The words roll like waves against rocks. Thorin wishes he could touch them: instead, he finds his peace in the weight of Dwalin's chest against his cheek.

“What does that mean?”

“Do you want to dance?”

“Do you use it with all the boys, or just with me?”

“Dumbass. Càite bheil an taigh beag?”

“And that?”

“Where's the toilet?”

Thorin's small laughter feels like heaven for Dwalin. A small sigh, and he holds him as close as he can. Thorin buries his fists in Dwalin's sheets, he presses his body to Dwalin's, and part of him hopes to press the anguish from his heart. It doesn't.

“I _miss her_ . I _miss her_.”

“I know, Blue Eyes.”

Thorin's breathing falters.

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. She's _gone_ , you have every right.”

“ _But it's been seven years_.”

“Thorin, Thorin, Angel, hush. Hush.”

Dwalin buries his face in Thorin's hair, and Thorin's trembling, “Tha gaol agam ort.”

“What does that mean?”

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Three times. Like all things sacred.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> asunn belongs to the [dwalin to my thorin](http://arrkenshield.tumblr.com), who was so generous as to allow me to use her.  
> tha gaol agam ort.


	17. part two

## the art of drowning
    
    
    Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
    and dress them in warm clothes again.
    How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
    until they forget that they are horses.

**(Scheherazade)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we move into the latter part of PBL, things will get heavier. **Trigger warning** for themes of _attempted rape, drug abuse, eating disorders, mental illness, extreme violence and homophobia_ discussed throughout **The Art of Drowning**. Individual triggers will also be placed at the beginning of each chapter accordingly.


	18. i

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for drug abuse mention towards the end.

**WINTER, 1986**

There are ways the bodies grow he will always marvel at. Ways the hands dip, ways the smiles change, ways that Dwalin's skin has modified itself to fit his bones. There are years that run through the dark matter of things and don't wake until they're shining in emptiness. There are hours he doesn't know have passed.

Bodies grow, as they do, and things change.

Some things remain the same: the sound of rain, the colour of his smile, the way his father makes him flinch.

Some things slip away: the green of his uniforms, the silences that stretch for months where he's not here, the way his laughter shines.

Some things turn to dust: ever feeling comfortable in his own skin again, the feeble hope of running away together, sleeping without nightmares.

He's grown into his bones and into his skin. He might still trip and run into things, but it's because his shoulders have become too large for comfort, not because his legs are too long.

The gravel beneath his feet crunches with brine as he hurries from the garage to the front door (it's quite the trek, crossing most of the manor's park) the air smelling heavy with wet snow.

“Hey, Thorin.” Frerin half waves from the book he's reading, curled up in front of the living room fire place as Thorin slams his boots clean in front of the door. He glances at his brother, “Frer.”

“Father's waiting for you in his study.”

“I didn't know he wanted to see me.”

A shrug, “Does it make a difference?”

Thorin unwraps himself from his scarf and folds it on a chair. He moves silently, like he's no longer used to the curves of the house. He finds himself forgetting it the longer he stays away, the darkness getting darker and the windows casting less and less light. Up the stairs in a pattern he no longer calls fear but simply bitterness, hands squeaking along the banister.

The door is wide open, and he doesn't even have to knock.

“I gather your trip downtown went well?”

“Yeah... yeah.” A second to lower his hand that was about to rap against the wood, “I found the part I needed to fix my bike.”

Thrain looks up from the files on his desk. Thorin catches a glimpse of an acronym, A.R.K.E., but the rest is covered by a piece of paper, and his father moves the whole lot into a drawer before he can finish reading. He's standing tense and ready to obey any order, back straight, legs straight, without even noticing: Thrain notices, and chuckles.

“ _At ease_ , soldier.”

His own muscles relaxing tell Thorin he was tense in the first place, and he giggles, a breathy awkward laugh that fogs the mood around them as if it had been frozen.

“I don't think I've ever seen that jacket on you, have I?”

“I've--”

He's owned it ever since Dwalin wrapped it around his shoulders one summer night in 1982. He's worn it every time the weather and dress code allowed it.

“--Probably haven't worn it much around you, then.”

He takes it off as if he'd been commanded, and folds it over his arm.

“Take a seat, son.”

Thrain pulls out a letter from under a book on his desk as the chair Thorin's picked out of the two across from his father creaks loud enough to make him feel like he's torn his way through the fabric of space. He places his jacket over his knees and waits for his father to move.

Thrain lights his pipe, and the smell is strong and ashy.

“I've gotten a letter from my dear friend Colonel Arterbury.”

The name's a name Thorin recognizes, and he gulps. Thrain laughs, “Don't look so sullen, Thorin. He's praising you to the high Heavens. You're, as per usual, an _excellent_ soldier. He says you'll do wonderfully in Ireland.”

Thrain _beams_ at his son, pipe tight between his teeth as he talks, and Thorin nods and the smile he makes is both from pride and satisfaction at his father's own. He's happy with him-- he's done _well_.

“Ireland.”

And the way he says it parrots his father's tone: a punctuation at the end, the final stitch to close the wound, a word that weighs more than his heart, and his heart's a heavy beast to carry.

Thrain winks at his son, “You'll show those Republicans how it's done, I'm sure. You're an _Oakenshield_ , aren't you?”

A nod.

“I am.”

“ _That's my boy_.”

( _Good boy_ , Dwalin had whispered past his grin when Thorin had come, whimpering in a flurry of moans, the night before, his hair cut too short for him to grip it, his hand wrapped tight around his neck instead.

Thorin shoves the thought deep down his throat and hopes he won't choke on it). His father sighs and empties his pipe tray, the sound a scrape along the back of his son's skull.

“You'll do good, son. It did _me_ a world of good.”

“What did?”

“Fighting. Seeing it, _for real_ , up close. It... changes you. Makes you better.”

This is a thing. A thing that will happen, soon, a thing that will make him miss Dis' birthday (he always had back in college, but now there's the sea between them and the crackle of machine guns), a thing that is more definite than simple training, a thing that is _dangerous_ , a thing that he hasn't told Dwalin yet.

It'll break his heart when he does.

“That said, “ and he takes a sullen drag from his pipe to punctuate the shift of argument, “Frerin's been giving me problems.”

“Problems?”

“Well, he's an Oakenshield. We've got a long and esteemed history.”

The glass eye in his skull and the medals on display, Thror's medals next to them, and the space Thorin knows will one day host his own.

“And?”

“He says he doesn't want to join the military.”

The _disgust_ in Thrain's voice, the flat tone, the shift of pace and rhythm. Thorin wants to shake his head and leave, but that isn't an option, and he knows this.

“He's... only seventeen.”

“You were eighteen when you made up your mind.”

A bitter taste on his tongue at the memory. If he could go back he'd never agree-- and yet his father is _proud_ , his grandfather sent him a letter despite the Parkinson's, he's doing _well_ , he's doing _good_ , he's doing--

He's following the rules, like he's supposed to.

“Frerin isn't me.”

Thrain sighs, “As if I didn't know,” and Thorin feels _disgusting_.

“No matter. He'll come around eventually.”

Thorin makes to stand, but Thrain stops him by grabbing his wrist. The gesture is as familiar as it is out of character and roots Thorin to the spot like hooks through his flesh.

“ _How are you_ , Thorin?”

“What do you, I mean, I'm _fine_ , why?”

“I mean-- _really_. I know it's not easy, being far from home and all.”

“I've been doing this for _three years_ , Father. I'm used to it. Or-- growing used to it.”

“Wait until you've been doing it for thirty.”

Thorin laughs at his father's smile, and Thrain lets go of his wrist. He grabs his jacket and makes for the door.

“How long will you be staying in Brighton for?”

“Just the week end.”

“All on your own?”

Thorin nods, “Yeah. I need some time to unwind. Big step, and all.”

An awkward nod when no answer comes.

“Well. Good night, Father.”

“Lord Joseph Warren told me his daughter's been interested in you.”

Thorin freezes.

“Has-- has she?”

“She's a _nice_ girl.”

“That's... not what I meant.”

“She might be interesting.”

“But--”

His father dismisses his words with a wave, and the smile, _the smile_ that's plastered on his face. His son is doing well and he feels as if he might burst with joy. Tall and strong, and after Valerie's death it's all he _wants_ : his children happy, and healthy, and _good_.

“Don't mind me, boy. It's fine, don't trouble yourself with it. You have bigger concerns now.”

Thorin thinks he feels his throat shrink so tight it's a marvel he breathes.

“Goodnight, Father.” he repeats.

“Goodnight, Thorin.” Thrain says, dipping his head slightly. And then, as Thorin's closing the door:

“Oh, won't you look at that? It's started to snow.”

* * *

Dwalin buries his face in the crook of Thorin's neck, one hand planted next to Thorin's right ear, the other slightly beneath the small his back, pushing them together as deep as he can go, sweat making his shoulders glisten even though outside there's the whistle of icy wind. MacFundin freezes, and shudders, and tenses, and then Thorin hears his pants become quicker and sharper, his movements more erratic. Dwalin grabs his earlobe between his teeth, rolls it. Thorin lets Dwalin ride his climax inside of him to the undoubtedly thundering peak, until he collapses, breathing heavily into his ear, his heartbeat slamming against Thorin's chest, an echo in his blood. Thorin waits for him to catch his breath and feels like he deserves to be in Hell.

The feeling flooding his veins slowly trickles away and leaves only endorphins to pool in its footsteps, Dwalin thinks he'll start whispering _I love you_ , but then something else creeps in, and he pulls back. He smiles at Thorin and Thorin forces a smile as an answer, small and desperate. Tender, a finger slipped beneath his chin, a hand running through his short cropped hair, the feeling of Dwalin's fingers on his scalp make his stomach buzz no matter how rotten he's feeling inside. Thoughts don't decompose like lungs, there's no smell of dying flesh. Dwalin has a new tattoo on his chest, over his heart, an eye crudely done in black ink. The quantity may be increasing, but the quality doesn't seem to be improving.

“Are you all right?” Voice as soft as sex makes it, Dwalin's calloused palm against his skin always feeling like it's about to make him _cry_ , “You didn't--”

“I know I didn't come. I'm sorry.”

“D'you want me to--”

“No. It's fine. I don't think I'll come either way.”

“Okay.”

Dwalin pulls himself out with a sigh and a breath of slight relief on Thorin's part, throws out the condom. As he lies back down, Thorin sits up.

“Thorin.”

“There's something I need to tell you.”

Dwalin sits up, too. A sinking feeling, the art of drowning, of learning how to live with water filling his lungs, of learning how to deal with this, this new pattern of things. _I love you_ he wants to say out loud, but something stops him from doing so, something he feels like he's already fighting against.

“After... after this block leave. I'm leaving.”

“I know, that's what you usually do.”

“ _No, Dwalin_. I'm being deployed.”

Reality isn't what it should be at all: it should stay put, stay silent, stay where it is. It shouldn't slip out of its hinges, it shouldn't mock with shrieking laughter, it shouldn't leave screaming for air, it shouldn't go, it shouldn't fall, it shouldn't leave you all alone in the middle of the room, shaking from the water seeping in your bones.

Dwalin stands up from the bed. The curve of his back in the moonlight as he bends over to put his underwear back on, the dip of his shoulders, the beauty, the beauty, the beauty.

He gets dressed silently,

“You know what I hate the most?”

and as he smoothes the creases in his shirt before buttoning it--

“ _I hate how beautiful that uniform makes you_.”

“ _Dwalin_ \--”

Thorin stands too. He's naked, hairs rising in the chill of the Brighton winds howling around them in the world outside the cottage, in the lie that he's always constructing ( _alone_? _not so much_ ) but he wraps his arms around Dwalin's hips and presses his forehead to the nape of his neck. Dwalin freezes.

“I'm so _sorry_.” Thorin murmurs, his voice fraying like cloth left in saltwater to rot. “I'm _so sorry_.”

And Dwalin stops buttoning his shirt, hands hovering away from it, hands feeling like they're going to shake. Thorin's voice is falling apart in front of him and there's nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he knows anymore, nothing he can remember, unless-

He turns, and holds Thorin's hands, and kisses the knuckles one by one. And Thorin stares at him as if he's just broken all of his bones. It's like this, it's the simplest thing: people grow up and their rhythms change, and when they find themselves in the middle they're nothing if not sinners. When they find themselves in the middle, they have to pull themselves together again, learn how to love again, learn how to live again.

“Where are you going?” Dwalin asks, words as heavy as lead.

“Ireland.” Thorin answers, and it's as light as a feather, blink and you'll miss it.

Dwalin spreads Thorin's hand open and presses it to his cheek. A small sigh as he feels his heart begin creaking beneath the weight, the beams snapping, the woodwork shattering. Always the little things, always the single breaths that make him feel like he's safe, always the illusions of the beauty of sanity.

But this is how it is, to love, in the end: a symphony he can never keep up with. This is how it is to love Dwalin MacFundin, this is how it is to love Thorin Oakenshield: over and over, whispers repeated in the dark, hearts presented to be held, _don't let me fall, don't let me fall, don't let me fall_.

Footsteps that follow his breathing, hands that ghost along his ribcage, the wind that howls. Thorin grabs Dwalin's face, gingerly, with both his hands, and Dwalin closes his eyes even tighter, and he exhales.

He _exhales_ : a single breath that rattles his chest like bones being broken.

“I'll _come back_.”

Dwalin smiles at the words, and he is so beautiful Thorin _knows_ he will cry, he knows it as he presses his lips to Dwalin's cheek, brow furrowed, “ _I will come back_.”

“From the dead, to haunt me.”

“ _Dwalin_.”

But Dwalin's pulling back, crossing the room, he opens the door: through the hallway, darkened, through the living room, past the books and the saltwater smell, and Thorin follows, follows like he's walking in a dream and searching for the light, the woods are cold in the hollow of winter, dark and deep and the snow dusts his hands like nothingness, he follows Dwalin through the house, and he haunts him, he haunts him, he haunts him _already_.

“Dwalin.”

But Dwalin doesn't want him to see or to look, doesn't want him to trace the light of the outside world along the cracks of his face, not right now, not right now when there's such a weight on his chest-- only Thorin knows how to break his heart with the ease of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and he will never tire of those slender fingers plucking through the fragments of his chest. The kitchen is shrouded in darkness, at the other end of the cottage: the light blues of the walls bleeding into the blue of nighttime, the white of the tiles shining like stars stained with madness. Towels on the towel rack, the remnants of their dinner still strewn across the table. Thorin had _laughed_ , the wine coloring his face, his cheeks, and now he can't tell if he sounded like a man walking towards death or a boy holding onto every inch of sanity he can find and sink his teeth into it, he can keep hidden in the back of his heart.

The wind howls like a monster through his throat, vomiting black ichor like saltwater pumped from a drowned sailor's stomach.

Thorin walks and feels every one of his bones through his skin. Walks like an equilibrist along the edge of a knife, and his feet are already bleeding. Barefoot and naked and so much smaller than he would wish to be, so much more fragile, the air racking across his spine, the air and the breath and the regret. He regrets all this so much.

He cannot turn back, he cannot return, there is no light at the end of this tunnel, no silences to fill his heart. After him, there is only nothing. After him, there is only earth and dirt and rain.

 _He is evertyhing_.

He finds him in the kitchen, hunched over the sink.

“Dwalin.”

A third time, and the prayer is set. Dwalin doesn't turn, or turns for a small glance, he can't tell, he doesn't care. He stands and feels the blood of Dwalin's heart staining him up to the wrist, up to his elbows, up to his shoulders, around his throat like a collar of thorns.

“Aren't you cold?”

Thorin shakes his head. Still, he hugs himself, still his eyes are blue, still he doesn't move. He waits. He waits at the end of the path for the pieces to find their place again. Dwalin's chest like a storm, Thorin's hands like the lighthouse, his own hand the ship lost at sea. Thorin's hands pointing at the sky, his hands like torn grenades, his hands that heal like holy water. Thorin's hands, those maddening things, his hands that cross the gap like the nights when they kissed beneath Thorin's window, _can I kiss you again_ , and it's been so long ago Dwalin would swear he dreamt it.

His hands pressed to his back again, his hands slipping around his waist, Thorin's forehead against the back of Dwalin's neck, and Dwalin grips those hands as if they were burning hot and he were freezing, as if there was any hope of seeping back life into him this night.

“I'm so _sorry_ , Dwalin. I'm so _scared_.”

And that's when he turns, when he's grabbing Thorin and he's pushing him to the wall, between the door jamb and the table, and he's kissing him only it isn't _kissing_ , not entirely, not correctly: it's gasping for air like they're dying, it's finding the madness between the teeth of sanity, it's trying not to cry, trying not to cry, wishing the blood between his teeth was his own.

* * *

The morning after a storm, and the pieces of driftwood strewn across the beach. The air is grey, the salt is murky, the cold doesn't allow him to lose more clothes than just his socks. His ankles already hurt, immersed in the water of the sea that feels almost like ice.

Thorin looks out to the vastness of the water, to the grey sky and the overcast sun that doesn't manage to seep through the heaviness of winter days at the beach, the sleeves of his shirt are pulled up to his elbows underneath his leather jacket, the plain white t-shirt underneath, the chill that suddenly racks his body.

He breathes, and the saltwater air fills his lungs and douses his throat in the aftertaste of purity.

He turns towards Dwalin, sitting on the beach with his jeans rolled up to his ankles, Dwalin who's rummaging through his rucksack, Dwalin who glances up and notices Thorin staring at him.

And he _smiles_.

And Thorin smirks, and uncrosses his arm, and throws his head back.

“What's so funny?”

“You're beautiful, that's what.”

He's gotten better at this, calmer in his presence, it's easier to pry the words from him better: it's easier to say _I love you_ , it's easier to make compliments, easier to acknowledge in Dwalin's face that what they have is here and is real and is _actual_.

Dwalin's smile widens, and then Thorin turns back to the water. A seagull circles overhead, crying a few times. He eyes it until it leaves, flapping towards the open water and the sky.

“Thorin.”

Thorin turns as soon as he's called and is greeted by the click of a camera.

“Dwalin!”

Dwalin grins, “What?” as he shakes the photograph to develop it.

“I told you, _no pictures_.”

“Yesterday you weren't leaving for Ireland.”

Thorin swallows and dips his head, the smile bitter, “Touché.”

Dwalin stands and wipes the sand off his pants, the Polaroid slung around his neck. MacFundin stretches and pops his back. His feet sinking in the sand as he walks up to Thorin. They stand shoulder to shoulder.

Dwalin slips his hand in Thorin's, and Thorin squeezes.

“There's a... farewell party, next week. Balin's invited.”

“Do you want me to come too?”

Thorin nods slightly, “Only if you promise you won't take my picture.”

A snort on Dwalin's part, “I won't. There'll be nothing to commemorate.”

“There'll be me.”

And Dwalin looks at him, eyes as grey as the sea their feet are sinking in, and doesn't say a word.

* * *

It is like a drop through the back of his hand, and he slips.

The slipping part is the easiest: it always had been. He'll climb back out later, when he's calmer, when he's emptier, when he's no longer being reminded these bones are his bones, this house his home.

Frerin stares at the ceiling for a few minutes.

The art of drowning is held in a needle he has to remember to throw away, with the feeling of wings, with identity slipping away, and there's only silence, for once there is only quiet.

The art of drowning, and his name's no longer Oakenshield.


	19. ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for discussion of eating disorders.

She does not think she will ever get used to it.

Hard, like nails gutting her, harsh, like the air being sucked out of her chest with a breath, with a breath, with water. She is small, and it is such a daunting weight to bear, like screaming, like swimming, like searching for a line to hold in the water. She does not think she will ever get used to it and she is, after all, split through the middle, split through the breaking, split through the breathing and the dancing and the searching, and it's so much like emptiness she feels like she's going to drown. Her hands are shaking. She presses one of them to her mouth not to whimper out loud.

You find things, in the cracks, _you find things_ , like trinkets and bird's hearts and promises, like her ribs showing through her clothes for a little while before she forced herself to eat again (that was in 1983, and she was 13, and she didn't know _hurt_ until her brother hugged her and he realized he could feel her bones creaking, and he didn't talk for two days) and she felt strong and good and _right_ , and so so scared. The second time she walked on glass she screamed, in silence, until her throat was raw and nobody could see it, when the scale started climbing back to seven stone, and it wasn't right, this weight on her chest, and she knew you had to carve it off, and that was still in 1983. And then for a while she learned how to keep the silence and enjoy it: like keeping the peace, like quieting the storm. There's water dripping through every crack in her room, and it's grown to her ankles, it's grown until her hands shake, it's grown, it's grown, like she's drowning, like she cannot keep the taste of ketosis at bay in her mouth anymore, and it's salt and it's sweet and it's laughter, for a while it is sanity in the form of an almost full plate.

She learns to teach herself how to eat again, and of course that's when her back starts breaking, her shoulders can no longer handle the weight, that's when she knows she can't talk, she can't breathe, she can't really think, either, that's when the water suddenly rises to her throat and the walls collapse and snap her neck. The plaster's grown runny, the foundations have started to crumble: she never knew they'd been made so shoddily-- but on the other hand, no one's in this world are ever solid.

“Hey. Hey. I'm here.”

A hand that cradles her head, fingers delicate, knotting with her hair. She hadn't heard him come in, Frerin like the breeze from the open window, the snowflakes blowing inside.

“You'll catch a cold, silly.”

The water of the shower is no longer roaring. She's shivering, this is true, like a body that's washed ashore, blue and bloated. Frerin's crouching next to the bathtub. She stares at him and the water that'd fallen into her mouth seeps out, like a mermaid whose legs have been torn. She shakes in his hands, and he sits back on his haunches.

“Let's get you outta here, Dee.”

But she doesn't move. This is calm, this is cold, this is her body burning aflame with the illness.

“C'mon, baby girl.”

His voice falls into patterns of softness, and sometimes that is enough. She grips him like she'd grip her mother, if she remembered her scent and the way her hands felt when they held her. She grabs Frerin and drags him against her, her hands buried in his sweater, and he freezes for good and for real, for a moment--

 _what if she sees the tracks_.

Only then her head is wet against his chest, and that doesn't matter at all. Dis shivers harder, now, her bones rattling inside her arms like they're swimming in fat, and he helps her stand, made of water still evaporating, with control seeping out of every pore. If you were to ask her how she fell into this, she could never be able to answer. Some things just happen, like spilling the milk, like falling out a window, like forgetting how the air felt when you breathed. Still he thinks of his own sins, and finds them more nauseating. Frerin closes the window, _don't slip while I'm turned_ , and sees her for what she is, and it scares him like Hell: she is so small he knows he could breathe and she would break, and he wraps the towel around his sister's shoulders and she still won't stop shaking. Sometimes words just don't cut it: you'd have to _see them_ , all flesh and bones and dirt, to know the tragedy.

She steps out of the bathtub. Six stone, give or take, and he doesn't know _why_. Her wet clothes cling to her spine.

Children with voices in their head.

Her head spins and she knows she has no voice. She is as she is, a ghost on the brink of a body. He sees her, nameless and formless, her fingers thin like the bones that they're hiding, and she folds herself inside her own crossed arms, hair trying to fall in front of her face. But it's wet, and it sticks to her skull.

“What time is it?”

“Dinner won't be for another twenty minutes, if that's what you're asking.”

He's stoked the fire in the fireplace in her room, and he's wrapped her in a blanket, and now he's sitting across from her on the floor. She scoots over, her tailbone aching as it pushes against the wooden floor, and he absent-mindedly combs his fingers through her hair. He does this slowly, terrified of pulling it out.

“That's not what I was asking.”

He begins braiding her hair. Slowly, as slow as he was while combing it, and the wood crackles and pops as it burns.

“Then why were you asking, Dee?”

It takes her a little longer to respond, this time. She's stopped shaking, finally, and her voice has almost regained life. Frerin's hand lingers for a second against the back of her neck. If she were to bend her head forward he could thumb every vertebra. As it is, as it stands, as he's found it, he simply goes back to plaiting her hair. She stares at the carpet.

“Dee?”

“I don't know why I was asking.”

“Thrain said he wants you to eat with us.”

She scoffs.

“Grandfather will be here, Dis.”

“As if it _matters_. You know I can't.”

 _Bullshit_ , but he doesn't say it out loud.

“It might--”

He stops braiding her hair. The braid is unfinished, and it would risk coming unraveled if her hair weren't still wet, heavy. There's a dust of scratches on the patch of skin that peeks out from under the collar of her t-shirt.

“It might help?”

The question mark is unintentional, yet it still happens. He bites his tongue.

“Help _what_ , Frerin?”

“I don't know. Help you?”

“There's nothing to help.”

His hands stop working on her hair. They linger for a few more seconds and then they pull back. He pulls back. He stands, and he sighs.

“Why must you always make it so difficult?”

She doesn't move from the floor, she doesn't take the blanket off, she doesn't care, she doesn't budge, she doesn't want to exist. She is _not_ , she is _not_ , she is _not_. If she could, she would become the absence of space. She is trying-- it's not working. The more the bones show, the more she feels them staring, the more she wants to slip. Her father had looked at her when she was drinking water fast enough to hurt her belly, and he hadn't said a word, only lingered along the veins showing on her hands. _Not a single word_ , but she'd felt dirty and shameful nonetheless, like she'd already eaten too much, like she was breathing someone else's air, and she'd take his low tentative grumble over his burying silences any time. Now isn't any different. Now it hurts _more_ , because Frerin doesn't know how to keep quiet, and she shrugs at his words.

“It's just how I am.”

“You don't weigh _seven fucking stone_ and call it how you _are_ , Dee. _Please_.”

If he could he would tear his throat open just to show her how much he loves her. If he could bloody his hands the way he's bloodying his voice. If he could strangle her illness out of her bones, he would. If he could strangle the darkness that's covering them, he would. He would. He would. If he could save everyone save for himself, he would take the chance in a heartbeat.

“Not now, Frerin.”

“Then _when_?”

“Never. I don't need-”

She's stood up, and her voice has grown harsher: she may feel like she's floating between worlds, but something's still there to stoke the fires. Funny how that happens: some people just tell themselves _survive_ , and then they do, till the end of the earth.

“I don't need your _pity_.”

“I'm--”

The gaze he gives, the emptiness in her throat. They are no longer people, yet they were never machines. They just _are_.

“Dinner's at half past seven.”

“Frerin.”

“What else am I supposed to say? What do you _want_ me to say?”

In the silence she doesn't know what to answer. In the silence she doesn't know what to do. She looks away, though, and she blinks.

“I don't know. _I don't know_.”

He looks at her not staring at him, and then he crosses the distance between them, and he buries his fingers in her hair, and she does not move because this is despite the voice in her head that's howling, what she needs maybe even more than air, but she will not _cry_ , because despite how scared she is she is made of iron first and foremost. Her hair's still wet, but there's some things you have to make due with nonetheless. To allow his body to become is always courage in his blood: with her it is always so easy, and finding crumbling spurs of rock to cut your hands against while trying to hold on is one of them, and he knows their fingers will never stop bleeding, their nails will never stop being cracked.

He presses her forehead to his.

“ _We'll find a way_ , baby girl.”

_I want to die, I want to live, I want to stop._

She wants to whisper it back, fill the cracks in his voice with her own, but something in the shine of his breaking tell her maybe this isn't the time to bleed all over his hands, maybe that can quietly wait.

* * *

The fork clinks lightly, shaking, when Thror puts it down. He clenches his right hand, unclenches it and then sets it down, too, slowly. He smiles at Thorin who doesn't know if he can smile back, and either way doesn't smile back on time, because his grandfather's already turned his head, and asks his son,

“Won't Dis be joining us?”

Thrain sighs, and wipes his mouth with his napkin, and then sets it back down, too, and it's as if they were dancing, only it's their hands that are standing on tiptoes. It gives him enough time to choose his words carefully, gives him enough time to decide what to say--

“No, Father. Dis hasn't been... _feeling well_.”

Thror furrows his brow, “She seemed fine earlier-”

“Upset stomach. I'll bring her something later.” Frerin interjects and clenches his fork like he's clenching a weapon as he forces to look and smile at Thror, and ends up staring at the empty dinner place across from himself instead.

That she won't eat. _That she won't fucking eat_.

His family's pinned him down to the wall, his family's pinned him down to the floor-- a chest he has not been able to move for so long, a breath he doesn't know how to take anymore. There's a _need_ , like the darkness encroaching, and he knows he's letting it take over more than should be comfortable, more than should be right. He flexes his arm, the band aid pulling and prickling at his arm hair, pressed between the shirt and his skin. Frerin tugs at his sleeve a little tighter, pulls it up over his wrist. He looks up to Thorin staring at him: the eye contact is as brief as it is violent and he's back to talking to Thror, his eyes on a napkin corner, because it feels like he's starting to slip down the ice, and he cannot afford to break an ankle, nor would he want to deal with the pain of it anyway. Not tonight, when getting high would be too risky (he can however, and is planning on, getting drunk, and if it is to happen he at least can dull the pain for a little while. Not enough to ignore it, but enough to keep on walking).

“It's nothing too bad, really, she'll be--”

“Frerin. Look your grandfather in the eye.”

He loses his grip completely and his eyes scream when his ankle snaps, when the pain radiates from somewhere inside his chest, when he knows he won't be able to stand again, when if this were real and it were _sane_ , he would be curled up on the floor and watching himself from the ceiling as he dissipates.

“I'm sorry.”

Thror's eyes are kind when they meet his, yet he says: “Come on, son,” nodding slightly before glancing behind Frerin's shoulder to Thrain, eyebrows slightly raised. Frerin does not want to interpret it, nor does he have the energy to dissect it.

“She'll be fine. She just needs sleep.”

Thorin lowers his head and stares at the fork that he's holding.

“I'll be right back.” he says, glancing to his father whose eyes simply follow him as he stands, as he turns, as he hurriedly walks to the small bathroom on the ground floor.

He slams the door behind himself and has to breathe, sitting on the closed toilet. He feels lost. He has to stop his hands from shaking. Dis is sick and he doesn't know what to do. Dis is sick and he doesn't know how to help her. Thror has Parkinson's and he can see it all over him, like a brand or a curse or a nightmare. He doesn't know how to help _that_ , either, and Frerin is creaking with all the weight in the world, and Thorin has no way of knowing how to carry it. And now he's leaving all of this behind. A breath. A _breath_ , you _stupid piece of_ \--

He has to rinse his face to even think of having his lungs pump air. _Dwalin_ , he thinks, _you'll be seeing Dwalin this evening_. A deeper breath, and he knuckles his temples.

 _I don't want to leave_ . He has to bury his face in cold water to quench down the ache in his chest. When he looks at himself in the mirror again, his eyes are red and he looks like he's been crying. He knows he hasn't (he's _sure_ he hasn't).

He steps out of the bathroom and sits back down. Thrain glances at him, he just slightly shakes his head and the smile he makes for his father is a scream. The salmon is served. He hates every single quiet meal he's ever had to have. The salmon is served and he doesn't think he'll stomach it. He doesn't want to leave. He doesn't think he should leave.

He knows he has to.

The salmon leaves a greasy ring on his glass when he drinks. He swallows and his stomach churns very slightly: it feels like it's sticking to his insides, tight and heavy at the same time, creaking from within like an old house.

“Has this been going on for a while?”

A conversation Thorin didn't even notice, his grandfather carrying the weight of worry they carried for a while, too, before this all became routine and worry turned to the type of resolute desperation you know will lead you to ruin and Dis became a ghost haunting their halls. God forbid she not become their mother through and through, down to the creak of her spine, and Frerin caught in the middle looking like a boy that's drowning-- and Thorin feels, more than anything at all, disgust. Towards himself for being unable to act, towards the state of things, towards things falling apart without his hands even being able to hold them together. Frerin, on the other hand, survives with what he has, and teaches himself to smile as much as he can, as hard and as deep as he can, until it might almost feel like he's pretending well enough, sane enough, good enough, while he loses bits like a figure of ash, while he falls and he crawls and he tells himself that walking on all fours is just as good as walking on two, and he will never stop clawing the floor, he will never stop skinning his hands on the doors as he's beating and begging to be let inside.

He wipes his hands and stands, “I'm going to bring Dee a plate.”

“That won't be necessary.”

It is like watching a dam break, Frerin's eyes flooding with anger. Still he clenches his jaw and swallows, and looks Thrain dead in the eye.

“She needs to eat.”

“She can come down and get it.”

Shielded from the pain the only way Thrain knows: an iron fist and words as heavy as blows. They are motherless, and he must _teach them to survive_.

“She won't. You _know that_.”

“Then this time she can _deign us with her presence_ and eat _with the rest of us_.”

His gaze does not waver where Frerin's is starting to tremble. There is such a _noise_ in eyes, such a simple desperate horror and churning, but he has to be brave. For her sake, and for his own that's non-existant.

“Sit _down_ , Frerin.”

Thorin is, very carefully, assessing the situation. He's ready to intervene if he has to, whatever that sentence fucking means in his head. For the time being, he glances at Thror, and Thror's face is as stony as his son's.

“Frerin--”

His brother's voice sends a spasm through his jaw, and if Thorin were trying to grab his shoulder, he'd shrug it off.

“You don't need to argue for my sake. I'm here.”

And Frerin's eyes seem to break for a third time. Dis has dried her hair and finished braiding it, wearing one of Valerie's old dresses. Something snaps in Thrain's chest, and it floods his throat with fluid, warm and sticky and maybe even a little lethal. Frerin, on the other hand, has just sat down, and he's _smiled_ , crooked teeth and premature crow's feet, and he hasn't found the right words to say. _It's a step_ , his brain tells him. It's a step.

“It's good to see you, Dis.”

She smiles at her grandfather, clenching her wrist with her hand, fingers overlapping holding bone, and when she sits across from Frerin she's sitting on the edge of her chair. Still she's here. Still she smiles. Still she asks for a little bit of food, and hardly eats it, but as she's doing this for a moment--

for the small, shaking part of her mind that knows what is happening and is terrified at the thought of it, screaming for this to stop, for that poor little kernel of anger--

there is hope. There is a silent small fragment, and it shines like the dawn.

* * *

Dis presses her back to the wall. She's holding a glass of champagne and she's watching as yet another relative shakes Thorin's hand, sweaty palm against sweaty palm, and Thorin looks like he's going to explode. She wets her lips with the alcohol and makes sure not to swallow any: her body wouldn't be able to handle it, and drunk is as scary as sober.

“So let me get this straight-”

And she _jumps_ , and nearly drops her glass.

“Oh dear, miss, I apologize. I didn't mean to startle you.”

He's not British. Dis stares at him as he brushes his hair behind his ears and smiles.

“No worries.”

“Well good. As I was saying: so let me get this straight.”

“Yes?”

“What we're celebrating is Thorin Oakenshield being sent off to kill people, right?”

She looks away from him and back at her brother. A gaggle of girls roughly her age (maybe older) have surrounded him. He wipes his hands on his jacket and wrangles a small laugh out of himself.

“Hopefully it won't come to that.”

“Did I say something wrong, miss--”

“Oakenshield. Dis Oakenshield.”

The color leaves his face, and Dis smirks into her glass. He regains it almost immediately.

“Well then, allow me to rephrase that: God bless Thorin Oakenshield, may he kill many Irish babies.”

And she _laughs_ , loud, half horrified, all amused, and Dwalin hears her from across the room as he's serving himself punch. He arches an eyebrow, and Frerin follows his gaze and has to turn his head to do so.

“Well won't you look at that. Who's the chap she's with?”

“Robert Princesson,” Frerin answers, and when Dis laughs he smiles and turns back to Dwalin and the glass of punch he's filling, which is where he decides to look, “American. Family went over from Poland during the war. They're business partners of Thrain's. He's studying here.”

He absent-mindedly stirs the punch with the ladle MacFundin isn't using.

“She came down to dinner tonight.”

“Did she?” Dwalin asks, handing Frerin his drink.

“She did.”

“That's good, isn't it?”

“First time in a month.”

Dwalin pauses. A series of giggles attracts his attention, and Frerin notices the way his hands clench into loose fists for a second when Thorin's own giggle follows the girls'. Then he says,

“Does Thrain even _care_?”

“No.”

Not even a moment to think. Brisk and cold, and sudden. “No. All he cares about is Thorin and his _fucking legacy_.”

The girls laugh again. Frerin grabs a flask from his pocket and spikes his drink. Dwalin watches him, an eyebrow arched, and the younger boy flashes a grin so sarcastic it nearly burns his face off.

“Should you be doing that?”

“ _Cheers_ , Dwalin. Enjoy surviving the night.”

His brother substitutes him nearly immediately. Dwalin doesn't even bat an eyelash.

“Fancy seeing you here, Thorin. How's your night going? Finally took the time to deign me with your presence?”

Thorin stares at Dwalin's face and then snaps, “ _Hide me_.”

“What?”

“Hide me. Lord Warren's daughter and her... friends haven't left me alone for a minute.”

“You didn't seem to mind.”

Thorin serves himself a glass of punch, “You're the last person I need this from tonight.”

Dwalin glances over at the girls. One of them smiles at him from behind her hand, elbowing another one in the ribs. Dwalin winks at her, and she blushes bright red.

“What are you doing?”

“Having some fun.”

“I wasn't _flirting with them_ , Dwalin, if that's what you're so concerned about. My father set them onto me, they're like fucking _bloodhounds_. I don't even...” His voice trails off and then goes as low as he can get it. “You _know_.”

“Tell me about it.”

Thorin gulps down his glass, and refills it, and before he brings it to his lips he says, “Well. There's no denying it'd be more _proper_.”

Dwalin puts the ladle down, “I'm sorry, what? I didn't catch that right.”

“I'm just saying that Lord Warren's daughter would be considered more appropriate than--”

“Than me.”

“Yes.”

“Now you're just being petty.”

“You started it.”

Dwalin scoffs, “You sound like an old scorned _queen_. What will you do, dance with one of them to spite me?”

“Don't. Raise your voice. Don't do this to me.”

“Cause it's all about the _legacy_ , isn't it?”

Balin looks up from chatting with Thrain and sees Thorin grab his brother by an arm and quietly lead him outside. Both of Dwalin's hands are raised, and he's shaking his head, and over the last four years his heart hasn't stopped breaking. Balin sighs, and makes a mental note to steer Thrain away from the veranda as much as possible.

“What the Hell is going on?”

“Nothing's going on, Thorin.”

“You're acting like a jealous _bi--_ ”

“Don't you _dare_.”

Thorin clenches his jaw.

“I'm sorry.”

“That's all you ever say.”

“What else can I say, when I can't kiss you?”

 _You could_ , Dwalin would like to reply. But those days are over, and he knows better now, or likes to tell himself he has to know better for their own sakes. They're standing outside, and they're meeting at the crossroads, they've always met at the crossroads, they're always running after each other in ways in between. Outside bedroom windows, in cars, in small tiny bedrooms, on old ragged mattresses, on the floor, in the space between hearts and chests. The crossroads, the in-between: there's a party just past the glass doors and they can't hear a word of what's being said.

Thorin looks inside and sees his sister laugh with that American boy, and it's as surprising as seeing her come down to dinner earlier. No one save for them is standing outside, because it's too cold, because it's too dark, because God sometimes cares enough to keep them safe.

“You're _leaving_ , Thorin.”

“I know.”

“What am I supposed to _do_?”

“I don't-- I don't--”

Thorin sighs.

“Why do you ask me questions you know I can't answer? I don't know what you're supposed to do. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know _anything_.”

 _Still you look like you hold all the answers, Blue Eyes_.

“I'm so scared.”

They both say it at the same time. Thorin smiles, then, both sad and senseless.

“Well then I guess we're made for each other,” he mumbles.

“What if you die?”

“I won't.”

“But what if something happens and you _do_? What am I supposed to do then?”

He can't lean over and fill the emptiness. He can't hold him, can't grab him, can't touch him or kiss him or ask for his presence in his hands, because Thorin will pull away, and there will only be the roar of waves, and there won't be anything tangible if not dust, and he _hates it_.

Thorin shrugs.

“Find someone new, I guess?”

Thorin has his ways of stabbing Dwalin every time, of slipping beneath the skin with such elegance the blade doesn't even come back out stained with blood-- sometimes two people can love each other even if one is a wrist, and the other a razor. And Dwalin doesn't know how to protect himself from it, because it comes to Thorin as natural as breathing, it comes to him with the same weight of thinking he isn't worth anything at all, as if he could be substituted, as if he could be found in someone else's eyes.

As if Dwalin had chosen all of this, any of this, at all. He glances away, and clenches his fists, and then walks past Thorin without saying a word.

“Wait, what? What did I do?”

“You even _ask_? You even have to fucking _ask_?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

“Do you even-- do you even _hear yourself_ when you talk? At all? Ever?”

“Dwalin--”

“ _Find someone new_ , how can you _say that_? How can you say that when my _heart-- when I've--_ when I'm--”

Thorin's eyes are glistening. He can see it in the light coming from the party inside, the light carving his face, the light making the ice beneath the blue shine like stars, and he thinks and knows those eyes will be the death of him, and it kills the words in his mouth, whatever they were going to be, whatever he was going to say.

“I don't know. I say things. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. I know how it bloody is. I've known how it is for four _fucking_ years now.”

Thorin sighs, and lowers his head, “I'm sorry.”

“Stop-- _stop saying that_.”

“What do you want me to _say_ , then?”

“I don't know. Anything. _Make me stay_. Don't make me leave this garden without a fight, Thorin--”

“Do you want me to tell you _I love you_? Now, right now, like this? Because I do, I have, I _always will_ \-- Not a _minute_ goes by where I don't think about you, where you're not _everything_. These last four years have been _mental_ , you _know that_ , but I wouldn't change them for the bloody fucking _world_. Dwalin. Dwalin. You're everything.”

Dwalin's shoulders fall, and his gaze does too, and Dwalin sees him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

“I don't want to leave for Ireland knowing you hate me.”

“Oh, Thorin, oh. _Sweetheart_.”

Thorin smiles as small as he can bring himself to, and it's still louder and brighter than any star he could see in the sky. And when Dwalin smiles back, Thorin feels his heart ripped out by the root.

“I'm coming back. If only so that I get to see that smile again. _If only for that_.”

Dwalin's sigh is shaky at best: his voice is already a mess of cracks and the moans of shattering stones.

“I knew you'd break my heart, you bloody bastard.”

“I love you.”

“Oh, _God_.”

Balin opens the glass door. A whiff of laughter and chatter,

“Is everything all right?”

 _No_.

Thorin smiles, “We'll be right inside, Balin.”

“Good. Your father wants to introduce you to Lord Warren.”

“I'll be... right inside.”

He glances towards Dwalin, and Dwalin just shrugs.

* * *

A quiet after the storm, a darkness where most of the lights in the house have been turned off. His father's long gone to bed, and he's nursing a half empty flute of champagne. He's sitting on the piano bench, and his hands are aching to play.

Thror sits next to him, and Thorin snaps out of the words he was muttering under his breath.

“So here we are.”

Thror moves slower than the last time he saw him, calculating every movement he can, his cane clenched in his right hand that never stops trembling. Thorin moves to give him more space, but Thror waves him back over.

“No, no. Sit down, Thorin. Come here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” and then he laughs, “but I've accepted it's the price of old age. Sit down, boy. I just want to talk.”

Thorin sits, shoulders hunched, and gets ready to listen. Thror leans against his cane.

“Your father's probably told you all of this. But-- Ah.”

He stares into space for a few moments, and right when Thorin starts to get nervous at the silence, he looks at him.

“It's all right to be scared. I remember I was bloody terrified.”

Thorin clears his throat and rolls his shoulders, “It's. Daunting. And with so much going on at home I just feel--”

“Home will sort itself out. Dis she... she has more of the Oakenshield blood inside her than she gives herself credit for. I have faith in her.”

“I should protect her.”

“You have other duties now, Thorin.”

Thorin glances up at the room around them, the piano he's leaning back against, the rows of books, the fireplace that's empty and cold. His home, as solid as his skeleton, that's burning from the inside out. He closes his eyes, and there's a vision of flames licking the walls, and there's nothing he can do to stop them.

“Your sister will fight her own battles in her own time.”

Thorin's face, and the lack of answers angry like claw marks in the hollows of his cheeks. His smile is one that's resigned itself to the world changing forever. Thror sighs and wraps an arm around his grandson's shoulders. The tremor expands like oil, and Thorin clutches the hand that's thrown over him in maybe a hope to calm its clamor. Thror squeezes his in return, and the old man smiles.

“You'll be _all right_ , Thorin. They might say it's a test and proof of your mettle, and all those pretty other words they love, and it _is_ that, but you are what you are. You're an Oakenshield. It's dangerous, but you'll be all right.”

“ _Non fugiamus ab bello_?”

Thorin's voice shakes when he says it. Thror raises both eyebrows at him.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. There's a reason it's the family motto after all, boy.”

Thorin nods and downs his glass, and all he wants to do is go to sleep. 

* * *

The roof is cold, but it's calmness, and it's windy enough to make his eyes water.

The door behind him opens, and only when she sits next to him does he realize he was waiting for her. He takes a swig from his bottle of wine and then hands it over to her. She shakes her head, he shrugs, she leans her head on his shoulder.

“I'm very proud of you. What you did was very brave.”

Dis scoffs. He doesn't repeat what he just said, and he doesn't pull away when she holds his hand and he knows his sleeves are rolled up.

“What's he like?”

“Who?”

“The Princesson chap.”

She pauses and puts down his hand.

“He's very nice.”

When the tip of her finger reaches the first dent in the top of his forearm, she stops. She stops, and lowers her hand, and stares at his arm for a few seconds that feel like lava down his throat. He doesn't move. He's too empty, he notices, to really want to move.

When he decides to look her in the eye, she doesn't look anything at all. It scares him more than her tears would.

“How long?”

“Half a year, give or take. It makes me feel-- human.”

It does not, but it's the easiest way he can explain it to her. She curls up against him, her head pressed to his chest, and she does not move, until it gets cold, until they grow quiet.

And then she says, very very low--

“We'll find a way, Frerin.”


	20. iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for mention (no graphic depiction, just the consequences) of an attempted sexual assault and for a graphic depiction of someone being beaten. either way, there’s lots of emotional anguish involved. please, please be careful.

**JUNE, 1987**

He thinks about writing him. Often, because he thinks about him all the time. Often, because he cannot breathe without the imaginary thought of having him near. He doesn't. Not when Mark dies in February, and not when Ashley follows at the beginning of March. Three more slip away, and he doesn't know if there's words loud enough to translate all the empty inside him. They call it a _plague_ , an _epidemic_ , and there's quilts being sown every day.

(Ian MacFundin dies, too, only because his liver hates him as much as his sons do).

Still he sits by the Thames and waits for the end of the world, and the end of the world does not come.

(He calls, once, and Thorin's voice unravels in the way it never raises from a terrified low whisper. Afterwards he knows he'd do more harm than good).

A hum in the air from his constricting throat, _Iron Lady with your stone heart so eager that the lesson be taught that you inflicted, you determined, you created, you ordered._

An old one, but still _relevant_ , he thinks--

Still the end of the world does not come: or maybe it came already and it passed him by. Pity, that he'd miss it.

Dwalin blows out smoke, and watches it as it frays the world through his lungs, through the aftertaste, his head falling back against the wood of the bench. He thinks of the river that's breathing next to him. It stinks like sewage, like the dead rats that float in the waves, like all the piss and shit and puke that's dumped in there each day. The flow of the river that cradles him, the quietness of slipping underneath, and he wonders if it would take his body to Ireland, if he gave it to her willingly: if he would allow the cold to find him, and cradle him to sleep.

(He wonders, too, if their relationship will ever be more than the spaces they find in between the lives that they're living).

“Fuck this shit.”

His back's started to ache, pressed into the wood of the bench, and he's given up on feeling anything that isn't bitterness for the rest of the evening. He finishes his cigarette, sits up, stands up and throws the butt into the sound of the Thames. The sound of the Thames, like the low heartbeat of the city ( _is his voice still your blood_?) and he doesn't think he'd be worthy of being welcomed by her.

“I need a drink.”

The bench doesn't answer. He figures it would be better if it did.

* * *

“You must be exhausted.”

Thorin smiles up from the hot chocolate he's nursing. His father smiles back.

“I am.”

“But you're all in one piece.”

“ _Thorin_!”

His sister's feet scream across the floor as she runs down the stairs and Thorin barely manages to put down his mug that his sister's colliding with his back, bending over the back of the sofa. She squeezes him: Thorin feels her ribcage press into his shoulders as his entire body tenses at her suddenness despite itself, his muscles coiling like a trigger about to be squeeze. He closes his eyes, briefly, “Where're you going all made up?”

She breaks the hug and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she walks around the sofa to sit next to him she's blushing behind her thin layer of foundation, and it makes him smile small.

“Just a party. Robert asked if I wanted to come.”

Thorin finds himself feigning surprise, “ _Robert_?” and then feeling the real thing as he looks at his father. Thrain frowns at him.

“I might be old-fashioned, Thorin. I'm not _archaic_.”

 _Some would beg to differ_. But-- has his father just made a _joke_? It must be the second time in his life he's heard him do so, which is approximately _slightly_ more surprising than him allowing his sister to date, and both as ridiculous as anything else. Thorin snorts, and figures he'll grill his sister on her new beau later, when he's rested (bone tired like death hadn't been screaming down his back in every dream), when he's--

He glances at the clock. Quarter past ten PM. He can still make it, he thinks, either if he sneaks out or makes up a reasonable excuse. Either way, he needs a shower first, and to change into civilian clothes, and to finish his hot chocolate, and to put down his things and see if he still fits in his bed, even though he doubts it, even though he hardly even feels like he fits in the air in the living room. He stands and stretches and grabs his duffle bag and grins at Dis, “Well. Don't be too late.”

When he makes to ruffle her hair she ducks and he laughs, and the mould around him cracks a little to accommodate the new shape of his hands, the new color of his eyes.

When he's made his way up the stairs, dragging his suitcase one step at a time, he catches, through the slightly open door, Frerin's vague shape on the bed, the dim night light sinking its jaws in his face, shadows like teeth and light in his eyes that stare lost into space. Thorin raps lightly against the jamb.

“Frerin?”

It takes his brother a moment, but he rolls his sleeves down and as he's buttoning them he does not smile, and all he says is, “Welcome back.”

“How are you?”

“All right.”

Like a script, from memory and off the top of their heads.

“Did you know Dis had a date tonight?”

“Yep.”

And then the silence. Frerin feels his brother's presence like a weight on the edge of the sheet, ripping through the cloth as gravity drags it to the ground.

“...Have I bothered you?”

Frerin's smile is a thing he cannot decipher: he is missing all the keys, every one of the parts of the code. Thorin flounders, as per usual, at interpreting his brother's face and the light of his fireflies beneath his skin. Frerin just shakes his head and stares at Thorin's right ear.

“I was dozing off, sorry.”

Thorin's small nod.

“How's Serendipity?”

“Seren... _Oh_. She's good. Rode her today, now that it's finally warm. She's good, yeah. Thanks for asking.”

The small talk has just reached the point of burning for the both of them: it catches fire quickly and becomes the roar of heat soon enough-- Thorin smiles one last time, and then simply walks away, and closes the door all the way without even thinking. Frerin stares at it and nearly trips on the book he'd used to snort off of as he's lying back down, and his skin pricks, and his skin laughs, and he curls up with his knees to his chest and goes back to avoiding the eyes on the wall.

Thorin takes his uniform off slowly, piece by piece, and finds that no, he can no longer fit in the air in his room once he's naked in front of the mirror, a stranger who has a body made for war. Hands, against his chest, his own as he tries to map patterns he doesn't even know. He steps into the shower and the warmth of the water like a roar in his ears, Dis' makeup on the sink, he turns the temperature as high as he can, and when it burns him he closes his eyes and does not move until his skin is red and the pain is right below the threshold of unbearable, in a way that serves to remind him of his purpose, in a way he's found reminds him he is not an instrument of violence, not a legacy, not a name. He has to, somehow, some way, stop himself from screaming. The hot water is one way: there have been no other ways he has had any interest in trying. The hot water is one way, and it has to be enough. He combs his hair and he shaves although there isn't much stubble to shave off to begin with, and he feels like a ghost of the memory that's lingered while he was away as he picks his clothes. A short sleeved button-up and a pair of jeans, and his old sneakers that never seem to fit his feet and then always do. Trapped between worlds: the child and the teenager and the adult he's become. He closes his eyes and swallows down the sound of his bones creaking, and he opens them again, and the world falls away: he stares at himself in the mirror and feels very close to imploding: more elegant than an explosion, curled beneath himself like crumbling stone. Less gore to clear up. Less blood splattered on the wall. He stares at the reflection, and lights himself a cigarette.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

His heart stumbles and stammers and his words become short and small. Small breaths, quiet, one after the other, his best kept secret like silver woven in his heartbeats as he stands at the bottom of the stairs.

“Out where?”

“Just... out. I need a walk. I need to... empty my head.”

“It's almost midnight.”

“Yeah, well...” Thorin gestures emptily with the cigarette, “...couldn't sleep.”

Thrain sighs: he hasn't left the sofa, pen in hand, the other holding a file. A piece of paper falls out, and Thrain bends over to pick it up. When he looks back up, his son's left his spot at the stairway and has walked over to where he's sitting. This time it's his turn to get up, gather his things and head to bed. But when they come face to face, he doesn't walk by his son. Instead he stops, and rests a hand on Thorin's shoulder. Beneath his palm, Thorin's body finds itself like a cat walking on the edge of a rooftop, in the solitary quivering of muscles tensing eternally, to the point of pain, squirming away from his father's touch so imperceptibly it is noticed only in Thrain's hand hovering slightly close to his shirt, and not touching it. Drawn away, in the space between their bodies that is spelled out in the eternity of two straight parallel lines never meeting, not even for a breath in between: science will never allow them to.

“Thorin. Don't let it eat you alive.”

Thorin furrows his brow, and smiles small.

“What do you mean? I'm fine.”

But Thrain shakes his head.

“I know I said it _changes you_. I know I said it makes you better, and it does. But you need to learn how to use it. Don't allow it to _win_ : it is part of you, now. War... it can either make you or break you. Don't let it break you.”

He gives Thorin's shoulder a small pat.

“Don't be out too late. I've already got Dis out and about. Will you be taking a car?”

Thorin quickly nods, and hopes Thrain won't ask him where he's going. He doesn't, and simply walks his way up the stairs: when he's already out of view, Thorin remembers to call out.

“Good night, father.”

The creaking of Thrain's footsteps on the stairs stops. Thorin can almost see the sag of his shoulders, the creases in his face, the beard that he's scratching right then.

Very small: “Good night, Thorin.”

Thorin waits for the words to dissipate, and then closes the front door as quietly as he can on his way out. 

* * *

Balin does not know how to approach his brother anymore.

There are pains like thorns underneath Dwalin's nails, he knows this because they have spoken of it briefly, but he is at loss when it comes to _cleaning_ him of the splinters-- he does not know if picking at them will do any good. He does not know how to remove them. He no longer knows how to clean his brother's bruised knuckles, and the thought makes him feel like he's lost sp much more than he wants to think about. So he simply looks at Dwalin from across the living room into the kitchen as his brother fixes himself a sandwich at half past midnight and he pretends to read the day-old paper.

 _Margaret Thatcher remains Prime Minister, winning general election for the third time_.

“Have you been to the job centre recently?”

The sound of the fridge door being opened, and then closed, the bottles in the door clinking. A drawer being opened, the sound of cutlery.

“...Dwalin?”

“No. I'll go in the next few days.”

“You really ought to.”

“Well, _I have bigger things to think about right now_.”

Balin hears the fridge opening again the moment someone rings the doorbell. “I'll get it,” he says as he folds the paper back onto the table and stands up to open the door. Dwalin opens a can of beer and takes a sip from it. He leans back against the table and realizes he lost his appetite sometime between grabbing two slices of bread and picking the cheese he wanted, and he wonders if he has it in him to head over to Notting Hill or if he'd rather just crash on the couch here and creep out before the sun goes up, when the world's quiet and he can forget what his bones are doing in his body, or if he'd just want to stand in the kitchen and stare at the wall until Hell freezes over.

Some would probably call this depression: he just calls this apathy.

Balin opens the door, and finds Thorin Oakenshield standing in front of him, and realizes right away where the beer he heard his brother opening will end up.

“Hey, Balin.”

“Well hello there. I suppose it would be useless to remind you that it would've been _greatly_ appreciated had you called ahead.”

Thorin smiles back at Balin, “Yeah. Sorry about that. Is Dwals...?”

There's the sound of a beer dropping, Balin rolls his eyes, he moves aside to let Thorin in, and he closes the door just as Dwalin slams his body into Thorin's. Not a thought, not a word, not even a mumble: Dwalin grabs Thorin and buries him in a hug, hands clinging to Thorin's shirt, face buried in his neck, his breath stopping and telling itself to quiet as he drinks in the weight of Thorin's arms around his shoulders.

And then a name “Thorin. Thorin. Thorin Thorin Thorin.” as he grabs the back of Thorin's head and his fingers scramble for purchase on his buzzcut.

“Hello, you.” Thorin murmurs past the air that's been knocked out of his lungs, with a small smile, with tenderness. When he pulls back, he places an arm on each of Dwalin's shoulders and Dwalin looks so _flabbergasted_ , so _happy and surprised_ he'd dance in the rain hand in hand with him if it were raining.

“I told you I kept my promises.”

“You came back.”

“I came back.”

And then Dwalin's grabbing his face and kissing him like the world's breaking and Thorin's lips are the last he has left. Maybe the end of the world _did_ come after all: but he'd never expect the rapture to feel so liberating.

Balin averts his gaze, Thorin laughs.

“All right, _all right_. I'm happy to see you too.”

“Sorry I just. I'd been needing that for a long, long while.”

And for a second they're both lost: Thorin blushes even though he'd been trying not to, and Dwalin's face breaks into a smile as wide as the world. Balin clears his throat and points to the kitchen,

“First you clean up the beer you spilt. Chop chop, come on.” and as Dwalin grabs a rag and bends down, “Thorin, can I offer you anything?”

Thorin shakes his head, “No thank you, Balin.” and smiles wider.

* * *

“ _Here_? With your brother _downstairs_?”

But Thorin's laughing, and he sighs when Dwalin kisses his neck.

“I've been waiting _six bloody months_.”

Six bloody months and words cannot even begin to be what he uses to tell Thorin he's missed him. Words do not have the _weight_ of hands to skin, of smiles, words cannot stoke his heart as well as Thorin's laughter and sighs do. Words, silly fragile _words_ will not bring his friends back to life.

“We can go back to my place! Father's gone to bed.”

Dwalin stops, and his eyes soften, and his eyes fall into Thorin's lips like he's searching for somewhere to drown. He kisses him again, small butterfly kisses that turn into the rhythm of his heart when their tongues meet. He presses one quick to the top of Thorin's nose and then sits upright. Thorin follows him almost instinctually, and leans back on his elbows when the movement does not follow the rhythm he expected, Dwalin on his haunches, Thorin's legs on either side of his hips.

“You've lost weight.”

And Thorin runs a finger along Dwalin's stomach: it makes MacFundin shiver and dip forward again for another kiss.

“That's _teasing_ , Oakenshield. Didn't you want to go to your Daddy's house?”

Thorin bites Dwalin's lip and smirks when Dwalin pushes him off, and swallows, and frowns at him.

“What time is it?” Thorin asks, and in the space between the question and the words he feels like he's suddenly drowning. Not scared drowning, though: the water is air, and it's filling his heart, and he's shining, and Dwalin's jawline is the glass against which the light refracts and spells out eternity in specks of dust along his palm. He missed this, too: it's funny how he realizes it only when Dwalin's with him.

“A little after one.” Dwalin answers, leaning over to check the bedside clock. Thorin snakes his hands around his hips and rests them in the small of Dwalin's back. He's tempted to go lower, but he stops himself, if only because Dwalin _glares_ at him.

“Don't make me tickle you.”

“Oh, _Dwalin_!”

“If you tease, I tickle. Those are the rules.”

“You've just made those up.”

“ _Try me_.”

Hand already shaped like a menacing talon, and Thorin raises both hands immediately, brings them to protect his chest. He's smiling, and his voice shakes in fear only slightly--

“ _All right_ , all right. I'm not doing anything. There you go. There. Nice and easy.”

Dwalin arches an eyebrow, “Good boy,” he hisses and it's Thorin's turn to glare at him. MacFundin simply smiles at him, winks and then smacks his thigh.

“ _Oi_.”

“C'mon, Blue Eyes. Up, _up_. Time to get you back home.”

But he can't help it: he's kissing him again even before Thorin can move, hands planted firmly on his shoulders, squeezing slightly. It's like coming home: his scent, his hands, his laughter. His voice. Lord, Thorin always forgets how his voice makes him feel like he's dying.

“I love you.”

Thorin stops the kiss to say it, but says it with their lips still touching.

Dwalin smiles and runs a hand through Thorin's hair. For once he'll have to leave the words to do the talking. For once he'll have to sow his prayers this way.

“Love you too, solider boy.”

Thorin smiles, and moves his head to the side, so he's staring at the space next to Dwalin's left ear, and then whispers, “We're being moved.”

Dwalin pulls back.

“What'd you mean?”

“They're moving us to Bulford.”

“Away from London?”

Thorin nods, delicately pushing Dwalin off of himself, “Yeah. About two hours away.” He smiles, though, as he's fixing his shirt and buttoning up the first three buttons. Dwalin's still sitting on the bed. He grabs Thorin's hand and kisses it, slowly. He begins with the finger tips: poetry in skin, the texture of his dry lips against the roughness of Thorin's palms, freshly calloused by cleaning and cleaning and reassembling a gun. Then comes each knuckle, the symphony of bone pressed tight beneath. The delicacy, the beauty. He imagines them as bruised as his for a moment, and then turns Thorin's hand around. The palm, plains of skin as boundless as the raging sea. He finds Thorin's pulse between the wrist bone and the tendon, and he presses his lips to it.

“I love you,” Thorin whispers to Dwalin who's kissing his hands as if they were those of the Pope, come to release him of his sins, and then he adds with the smallest smile, delicately moving his hands so that Dwalin can look him in the eye: “And besides, Bulford's always closer than Ireland.”

Dwalin smiles back-- and every word they speak, every kiss is a small little whisper-- _Don't go, don't go, don't go_.

* * *

There's a car in the driveway Thorin doesn't recognize. It's probably Robert's, he figures-- still that means they can't go through the front, like he'd hoped. There's no way, as a matter of fact, that they can creep in through the living room undetected.

For a moment he remembers the apparition, so many years before, of his father like a ghost wanting to know where he'd been. _Do you let the boys fuck you_. He shakes his head, once, and the ghost is gone like smoke.

“It's fine. I can just say hello and then pop back out.”

Dwalin speaks it like he's already walking in darkness. He smirks, however, and leans close enough to grab Thorin's earlobe between his teeth as he's parking, slips a hand between Thorin's leg and squeezes, slightly, once, before pulling away.

“Besides, two weeks is a _long_ time.”

“Fuck off, MacFundin.”

Dwalin only laughs and winks at Thorin, and then he jogs after him and nearly snatches him by the hips. He _remembers_ , then, and stops with his hands still on fire.

Inside, however, the walls have been crumbling like statues of clay. There's blood dripping from them, from the ceiling seeping into the floor, blood that's the color of Dis' quiet sobs, blood that isn't there but _reeks_ through the house like the way she's sitting on the piano bench, hands in her lap, and Robert's hand's on her shoulder, clutching as if she were about to fall to dust, or he were about to break, or reality were on the brink of imploding. When Frerin looks up from being crouched in front of his sister and sees _who_ Thorin's with he scoffs, and rolls his eyes and snarls under his breath-

“ _Fucking typical_.”

“What's going on?” Thorin asks, coming closer. Suddenly he is a lion walking on a tightrope. Suddenly he knows that if he breathes too loud the walls will tumble down. Which is when he sees Dis' bruised knee, and the bruise on her arm, and the strap of her dress that's torn.

It is easy to put together the pieces. It is easy, and in its easiness it _comes_ : Dwalin sees Thorin's hands grow very still and then clench, slow, into fists. It is not the first time he sees this: it is the first time he sees this wear Thorin's skin. Dis stares at her brother, wide-eyed-- In the tone. In the tone of Thorin's voice that already sounds like their father's. Dis knows where this is going, Dis is quick to shake her head as she sniffles, as she brushes a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Nothing, Thorin, I'm fine.”

Her words like a _lie_ , like a _scream_ only quiet, and that is when something snaps in the back of Thorin's head and his eyes rearrange themselves and burn in the fire. It is _**easy**_ : like a floodgate opening. His mind shifts, his mind stops in its tracks and it _blossoms_ , like flowers of madness, somewhere in his chest, beneath his breastbone. _She's hurt_ , someone tried to hurt her.

“Don't lie. Who was it?”

“ _I don't want to_ \--”

“Jack Brasher.” Robert answers for her, and Dis stares up at him and shakes her head, frantic, “No. No. Please. Please. There's already been so much _violence_.” Back to her brother, grabbing her hand that he's quick to pull out of her grasp and leave her shuddering in nothing. Frerin's biting the flesh close to his left pinky nail, and he feels the small trickle of blood that comes from it: like the rust in his bones, it tethers him to what's real long enough not to slip away in the cracks of his head. Still, he doesn't stop. Still, she was hurt and there is nothing he can do about it and he wants to stop the world and scream at it to _go back_ to _keep her safe_ to _not hurt them, not hurt them, please_. Please. There is nothing he can do if not hold her, her head pressed to his chest, one arm around her shoulders. She holds onto Frerin like he's the flotsam that will save her: he is the only fraction of solid in the world that is floating and pain. He is the only breath of quiet. More than Robert, or Thorin: at the end of the line, it is his light she will always use to guide her home. Still, Thorin realizes what he's done, how he's left Dis with nothing to cling to-- He then covers her hands with his. She doesn't move. She is not swayed, she is not distracted from the desperation of her pleading, “Thorin--”

It's her turn to tear her hands from his grasp, and she covers her mouth with her hand, and she murmurs, “Please. We don't need _any more of this_.”

“Dis. _He hurt you_.”

“I don't _care_ what he did. We are _better_ than him.”

“He hurt you.”

Thorin ooks up and does not see Thrain save for hands shakily placed on the banister that he catches a glimpse of, in the darkness. His father's rings glint in the living room lamplight. And the rage starts growing so loud he knows he's about to howl, crawl on all fours, shed whatever mask he's wearing in favor of the fire that's burning his innards, oh, like the wolf like the beast like the _monster_. Good only for one thing. Good only for one thing.

 _Non fugiamus ab bello_.

His father's hands that curl into fists, before he finishes walking down the stairs, before he stares past his daughter curled in her pain and straight into his eldest son's eyes. Neither of them move. Neither of them flinch.

Thorin knows what he has to do: and truth be told, he was already planning on doing it.

“Rob, where was the party?”

He does not break eye contact with Thrain as he asks.

“Michael Road, Fulham. Number ten. It's near the Eel Brook Common.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“ _Thorin_.”

But Frerin cradles her when all she wants to do is scream.

“Thorin?”

His father's voice sounds as if it were coming from deep beneath the earth. Through the centuries. Through the mud and the blood and the spit.

“Yes.”

“Take... the Thunderbird. Check the glove compartment.”

And Dis _keens_ “Father, _please_.” and bends forward with only Frerin to catch her against his shoulder. Thorin stops in front of the door with his eyes the colour of Hell.

“Let me come too.”

“Robert, _no_. Not you too.”

Thorin looks to Dis then back to Robert, “No, Rob. She's right. Dis needs you.” and then snaps a gaze, plants it between his brother's eyes, “ _Both_ of you.” and without the limited protection of his glasses Frerin knows the words he's about to speak will be killed. He did not need this, Thorin. Not right now when the fabric of things is falling to pieces around you all.

But the one Thorin _does_ turn to is Dwalin.

“Are you coming?”

This is an offering of baptism in blood. This is an offering of no coming back. Dwalin looks to Dis, sees her as small and as fragile as ever, and feels in the pit of his hands and his gut, that the world is about to end, and that things are about to be broken in ways that will never fully be healed. Dis presses her face to Frerin's chest, and Frerin buries his hands in her hair, whispers something in her ear. And she does not stop crying. And she does not stop shaking.

“Yes.”

They walk back to the garage in silence, in quickness, and to watch Thorin nearly jog is to see a monstrous black mass crawling towards the threshold and the precipice. His breathing is as labored as his hands are shaking, and there is nothing _right_ in this, nothing _righteous_ , nothing _good_ in a sixteen year old girl left to salvage her wounds in the dust, and when Dwalin looks at the back of Thorin's head he sees nothing but horror, and beauty, and savageness.

Thorin throws the garage doors open and slips past the cars, to the back, grabs the keys to the Thunderbird and throws them at Dwalin who grabs them, who watches as Thorin stares at the wall of sports appliances and then begins tearing through them, tennis and badminton rackets, a golf bag full of clubs: his gaze lingers on it, for a moment, but he deems them too light, not heavy enough-- he needs something as deep and heavy as the weight on his chest. He needs something as heavy as the lead he is carrying in his bones, something that will move the way he moves, like an animal, like the thing at the bottom of the pit with its teeth stained in blood.

The cricket bat feels as if it were birthed from his hand. When Thorin turns, roaring, throwing his weight into it, Dwalin thinks he's about to smash the windows of the Roadster in. He stops, a fraction before, and his body is the tenseness of silence before death. There is glory in finding a good weapon. There is almost holiness.

“I'll drive.” Thorin snaps, and Dwalin knows not to answer him.

Still, the silence in the car falls like rain on his open hands. The emptiness. The rage he feels in his bones like the poison like the plague. Thorin's knuckles are nearly white as they clench the steering wheel. He has never seen him like this, never seen him wear his skin inside out, never seen the jaw clench the eyes burn the hands melt in the flames in the flames. He has seen it on himself.

But on Thorin?

On Thorin it should never have been placed.

Still the end of the world seems to come, if not in the image of Dis hunched on the piano bench every time he closes his eyes, and he needs to erase it, needs to drown it, needs to find it in the space beneath the madness of this or else he will suffocate in the anger, and there will be nothing but dust.

“Mark's dead.”

At a red light, so lawful compared to the death the two boys are dealing amongst each other. Dead boys and dead girls and dead dreams. Dwalin feels the chill of the wind as his feet dangle over the edge and allows it to fill his bones. It does not soothe the rage: it makes it louder.

“Shit. I'm sorry.”

Thorin is finding it hard to form words. His tongue is not made for words, not right now: his tongue is to stay locked between his teeth, at bay like every other snarling inch of his body. His tongue is not made to be seen. His eyes are not made to be seen. You cannot be seen when you are not human. You cannot exist when you are burning with righteous fury.

“Ash's gone too.”

“Overdose?”

For a second Dwalin's rage changes: from desperate, scrambling for purchase on crumbling stone to righteous, absolute and true.

“AIDS. _Fucking AIDS_.”

“...Both of them?”

Dwalin does not remember lighting the cigarette he's smoking, “Yeah.”

The epitome of pantomime: a mock conversation, a _how's the weather_? _not bad_ mimicked by two men with the bones of the dead and the dying around their necks and in their pockets. He died, she died, we are going to kill someone, there is nothing in your eyes if not the whiteness of your rage.

And it's true-- Thorin's eyes are glassy, the pupils dilated. The wrong skin, the wrong hands, the wrong boy. But Dwalin's heart isn't beating any slower.

There's a gun in the glove compartment, and it's when Dwalin's mind snaps back into reason. Thorin's just slipped it into the waistband of his jeans.

“Thorin, no. That's too far.”

“I'm not shooting him, don't worry. I just wanna scare him.”

There's a cluster of people in the garden in front of a house with all the lights off and all the blinds closed (no parents at home, _not yet at least_ ), the last few stragglers left behind no older than seventeen or eighteen. All boys. Thorin makes his way up to them, and when he smiles he is _dripping_ charm.

“Hi. I'm looking for, uh-- John, maybe? Brasher.”

One of the boys squares Thorin head to toe, “Who's asking?” he snarls with a jut of his chin.

His nose's been recently broken. Thorin notices this, and his smile melts into a clenched jaw, seamless and terrible.

“Hi, Jack. I'm Dis Oakenshield's brother.”

The boy's eyes widen, for a _split second_ , and then he turns and runs towards the back of the garden. Dwalin swallows and crosses both arms and watches as Thorin bounds after him.

“Oh no, _no you don't_!”

Jack trips, loses his footing followed by Thorin's roar, and he feels the weight of Thorin landing into him. He hits the ground and the scabs in his nose open again, and Thorin's pressing three knuckles into his cheekbone.

“Get in the _car_ , Jack.”

The boy only screams in reply.

Thorin fires a shot close to his head. It echoes as it drills through the ground, like a whip crack, and Dwalin can't see much in the darkness.

“Fuck, Thorin.”

But Thorin comes, dragging Brasher by the hair half on his knees, half wobbling along. Brasher who's weeping.

“Get in the fucking _car_ , Jack.”

“Jesus shit what the _fuck_ do you think you're _doing_?”

Thorin throws Jack onto the pavement and points the gun at his friend. The kid stops in his tracks, and stares down the barrel. Thorin tilts his head.

“I can pull the trigger. I pulled it before, I can pull it again.”

Dwalin shakes his head, “Thorin. Thorin, we have the boy. Let's go.”

Thorin swallows.

“Let's. Go.”

And this is not the man Dwalin fell in love with. And this is nothing if not the man Dwalin fell in love with.

Oakenshield opens the door to the seat in the back and shoves a whimpering Jack onto it.

“Drive.” he orders Dwalin, as he sits in the passenger seat, “Take us somewhere quiet.”

He's put the gun back into the glove box before turning towards the back seat as Dwalin takes a side road.

“Listen, Jack dearest. You try to _run_ , and I'm going to plant a bullet in your fucking back, like the _pig_ you are. Understood?”

Thorin's voice is a low growl, as flat and toneless as the whirr of a machine.

But when Jack sobs back, “I was just having _fun_ , man, I didn't mean _anything by it_!” Dwalin feels his rage clamber to the peak like pain that has no where to go if not up.

“Shut. _Up_. If you don't want me to break every bone in your _miserable body_.” he hisses as he takes a left. They park close to Battersea Bridge, the roar of the highway in their ears. Thorin's the first to step out. He grabs Jack by the shirt, shoves him down the gravelly slope, where the bank nearly meets the river. He whines, curled on all fours.

“Having _fun_ , weren't _you_ , Jack?”

Dwalin watches as Thorin skits down, after the boy, the cricket bat in his hand. He turns the headlights off. He waits.

“Please. Don't do this.”

“Should've thought about it _beforehand_ , Jack.”

The cricket bat collides with Jack's hip with a sickening thud. Jack screams. Thorin hits again. A rib breaks. Jack tries to stand, but Thorin swings and catches his kneecap, and the boy falls, and Dwalin closes his eyes when he shrieks again.

“Please. Please _don't do this_!”

“Having _fun_ , were you? What was she, a fucking _doll_ to you? A fucking _toy_?”

He hits him in the face. Twice. Breaks the nose again. Breaks the cheekbones. And she's _there_ , curled up on herself crying shaking begging him not to do this and she's _there_ his little sister Dis with her blue eyes welling with tears her bruised knees the signs on her arm where he'd grabbed her she's there, _over and over and over_ like needles slammed into every joint of his body propelling him forward, he slams the mallet into his back when he tries to crawl away, “Thorin.” he kicks him hard enough to flip him over, and she's _there_ , every step of the way, and she's begging him not to do this, “Thorin!” and he's floating a mile away, and he's doing it anyway, and it's something wearing his skin, and he breaks something he thinks it's his sternum and the pig doesn't wail simply gurgles as things break protected by the fragility of his skin and “Thorin! Thorin, for fuck's sake!” Jack stopped moving three whole minutes ago.

“Thorin. Thorin, leave him! Thorin, he's dead.”

“He hurt her, he hurt her, _he hurt her_! HE HURT HER!”

“ _Thorin_.” Dwalin digging his nails into his shirt and dragging him off of Jack because he's moved to his fists, to his simple hands to fill the silence and the chasm and the scream, the _scream_ Thorin lets out, a howl like his teeth are being pulled. _He hurt her, and there was nothing he could do to stop him._

But then he stills. And then he pushes Dwalin away and throws the cricket bat aside and crawls off of the boy, and he's leaning on his hands and knees.

The police arrive and he doesn't move. The officer has to drag him to his feet, after he's identified the car, after he's leaned over Jack and had to look away in bewilderment.

“Jesus. Call an ambulance.” he mutters to his colleague.

Elrond Peredhel, twenty-six years old, fresh out of the academy, unceremoniously slams Thorin against his car to handcuff him.

Thorin's chest is hollow.

“He had it coming, officer.”

“You have the right to remain silent. Get in the car.”

* * *

Elrond's head is pounding. He takes a sip from his water bottle, and absent-mindedly stares through the glass door of Gil-galad's office.

“He won't make it.” he says.

“I'd be surprised if he did.”

“He was... it was. Fuck, Gil. He didn't stop. The kid must've been knocked out ages before we got there and he just. Didn't. Stop.”

“Well according to him, the boy nearly raped his sister.”

Elrond puts his bottle down. “That doesn't excuse either of them. Not Oakenshield, not his buddy.”

He looks away from the paperwork he's compiling to stare at his hands and then back up. Which is when he sees, still through the glass doors, Thrain Oakenshield talking with his son and Dwalin. There's someone else, with them, too. Someone Elrond doesn't recognise.

“Gil-galad, what the Hell's going on?”

Gil-galad looks up, then back down.

“Gil, MacFundin hadn't been questioned yet. What's going on?”

Elrond swallows uneasily. “Gil-galad.” he almost barks out loud. Not quite, though. Not yet.

Gil-galad sighs.

“All right. See that man with Oakenshield?”

Tall, unbelievably tall, clad in grey. He says something, and Thorin shakes his hand. Dwalin doesn't. Elrond narrows his eyes at him and nods.

“That's... never mind his name. For now, know him as G. That's G, all right? Thrain Oakenshield is one of G's friends. You don't _fuck_ with G, or his friends.”

“... _Excuse me_?”

“If G says that Oakenshield and his buddy have to be let go because Oakenshield's daddy said so, we let them go.”

Elrond clenches his jaw.

“Oh my God. I didn't know we were back in the caveman age. _Sorry for stealing your animal hides, now you're gonna club me over the head for it._ ”

“It's the way it is.”

“It's _illegal_.”

“It's. The. Way. It is.”

“They _murdered_ someone.”

“I know, Elrond. Don't think I don't.”

But still that's the last he will say on the matter.

* * *

After Dwalin's been dropped home (and Thrain had explained, in hushed whispers, all that had happened), the quietness in the car feels like food being forced in his mouth to chew. Thorin stares out the window as the sun begins to rise over London. He has been looking at his hands for the past three hours and has been unable to reconcile the truth of them being his hands with the awareness that he is not, in any way, real. He is floating, maybe, and that is all he will grant himself.

But Thrain has been steadily breathing as he has been driving, and that is at least a vague notion of actuality.

“Son?”

Thorin barely stirs at the sound of his voice.

“You did the right thing.”

He knows what he has done. This, at least, is real: he knows he has done what he had to do, the _only_ thing he felt he could do. And he nods, very slowly.

“I know.”


	21. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for once, nothing sad actually happens !! yay !! although slight tw for the second half, mainly for some... somewhat morbid/dark humour concerning eating disorders and addictions.

She sees him-- or rather, sees the top of his head, past the group of fellow first years she's trying to walk in front of (they walk, as always, so _maddeningly slow_ , and this time she truly resents them to her core) right outside the faculty building. Dis ducks her head and lets her hair cover her face, but it's too late.

Robert sees her.

“Dis!”

She clutches Tony Weir's _An Introduction to Tort Law_ tighter to her chest and steadily walks past him, ignoring the smile on his face that he lets drop as soon as she ignores him. Robert wipes his hands on his pants.

“Dis?”

She doesn't answer. There's a tremble underneath her breastbone: shame comes in many different colors, and in her case it's a slight as the summer air that's floating through her bones. Not here. Not you. _Please_ , not you.

“Dis!”

Rob jogs after her and catches up quickly, hands in his pockets. She ignores him. She bites her lower lip instead, and prays her tongue will keep her silent. She hates this. She hates having to be this, she hates having to do this, she hates everything _about this_.

“Dee, don't ignore me.”

She shakes her head in reply and quickens her pace, leaving him behind until she gets to her car, her feet crunching in the gravel. She has to stop, however, to look for her keys in her purse, and ignores the fact her hands are slightly shaking (has she eaten lately? She can't remember, and doesn't care, _does it matter anyway_?). Robert nearly stops behind her, but then moves to her side-- she hears him like ice beneath feet, and sees him out of the corner of her eye and inside herself she _curses_ at his tenderness.

 _Oh, why must you make this so difficult, darling_?

“Dis. Come on.”

In the meantime, she's found her car keys.

“Dis, there's so much I can handle. You've been ignoring me for almost three months.”

“Well then you should've _moved on_.”

She says it stern, she says it sharp, and quick, and hissed from behind the armor of her clenching teeth and the weight of her eyes suddenly barreling into his. He furrows his brow at her and shakes his head,

“ _What_? No! No, Dis--”

and grabs the car door as she's opening it, holds it in place and so stops her from stepping in, because if she were to try and move it she'd be forced to crush his fingers. She exhales, and shakes her head, and clenches her jaw at him. Her father's daughter, through and through, more similar to him than she has ever noticed: they all carry him in their hands and their jaws. They all carry him in the mirror that spits back their fleshy bags of bones, even if they don't want it to be so. It's all in the jaws. It's all in the hands. It's all in the eyes.

“Robert stop this.”

“I just wanna understand. I just wanna understand. _Three months_ , Dee.”

She nods, and swallows, and Robert can see her larynx press against her skin when she does. He stops himself a second before he asks her if she's eaten, only because he knows it'll only make matters worse.

“I know.”

“Then _why_?”

Dis Oakenshield closes her eyes and throws her purse and her book in the passenger seat of the car, since the door is still open, and this can buy her time, this can make her count down until she can feel part of the world again, or at least like she can handle this conversation that has decided to happen right now, it seems, without her having any say in it whatsoever, the distance between herself and Robert and the car so large it seems unconquerable, all of a sudden, and it has _all_ become so maddeningly slow, maddeningly sluggish: the chaos of her first dances has subsided, slipped into comfortable acknowledgement of the bones beneath her skin. Sometimes she grants her body food because it _begs her_ , but she knows and it knows that she will only give it enough to survive. Nothing more. Nothing less, until the sky breaks and she drowns with it.

But _why_? Why would she do this to herself? Why would she reach down into her chest, her hand trickling and creeping down her mouth until her fingers found her heart and then they squeezed around it, and when she begged for them to stop, they'd just tug and tear until she tore it out, and dragged it past her mouth, and dragged it past her teeth? And then she'd be standing silently in the middle of nothing, and she'd have a mess of mangled flesh in her hands, and that would be it.

“Because--”

She smiles at him when no other words come out. _Because_. Just because. Because there is an ocean of nothing inside her, and she wants to drown in it on her own. Because there are hands on her arms clutching still, and she cannot seem to chase them away no matter how small she makes herself. Because her brother chased them away with a cricket bat and a coma. Because he took her pain for his own rage and it terrified her. Because she is tired.

Because she is so, _so_ tired.

“Dee.”

Robert's voice, curved ever so slightly upwards by tenderness and the vestiges of a Brooklyn accent overwritten by received pronunciation, makes her smile shake on the brink of pained joy. She lowers her hands from where they found themselves clenched to her chest, and finds one resting on the car door next to his. _Stupid_. Robert fills the silences for both of them and doesn't move his own hands closer to hers.

“If you don't want to date me, that's okay. I just need to hear it. Closure, I need closure.”

“That's not it!”

He's startled, she's startled: she's said it fast before he finished speaking, to stop him even before he can manage to complete in words the thought that's formed on his tongue.

A pause, in which her shoulders sag. When she realizes he's realized too, she lowers her head to follow her shoulders, and he waits for her to decide to move. She doesn't, and he is okay with that too.

“That's not. That's not it, Robert. That's now what I want.”

“Then what _do_ you want?”

Peace. A quiet mind. For the party's stains to finally wash away. For _quiet_.

For quiet most of all.

It's then that he covers her hand with his, teetering on the top of the car door that divides them. She could close it, and break both their hands. She could move her hand, and she knows he'd move his and that's all the answer he'd need to leave. She does none of that. Instead she lets him stay, small like any other miracle.

“I'm sick.”

“I know, Dee.”

“My family's a lot to handle.”

“I know that too, Dis.”

“And it doesn't scare you? It doesn't disgust you?”

He squeezes her hand, and she glances at it.

“No. It makes me worried, but it does not disgust me.”

The effect of his words is the same if he'd spit at her. Oh, that's almost _worse_ , to know she's made him worried-- for a moment. Then she remembers this is how it is now, and she wrangles it into something that will make breathing bearable.

“I wish I could help, though. I wish I could do that more than anything.”

“I'm not a puzzle you can fix.”

He nods and tilts his head to the side, “True. But you're not an island, either, Dee: you can't just float away somewhere at sea thinking it won't affect anyone else. Besides,” and here's where the dopey grin comes back, and she has to bite her tongue,

“Isn't it nice to have a hand to hold, every once in a while?”

She scoffs and peels her hand away from underneath his as if to reply with simply that. The miracle, she feels, has just broken.

“If you're here just because you feel my hands need holding, this conversation is as good as _over_.”

“Dis. I'm sorry, I said it wrong. There's a _million_ reasons why I'm here. I know what I'm getting into. I know your family's...”

“Fucked up.”

“Sure, fine. But you're not something I want to fix, because you're not _broken_.”

She arches an eyebrow.

“Funny. I thought I most definitely _was_.”

“What happened didn't _ruin you_. It's not a stain, it doesn't mean you don't deserve good things,” and that's when her eyes start glistening, “C'mon, Dee. Hey.”

“ _I hate that you were there to see it all_.”

“I know.”

He didn't, but he says it anyway if only to see the glass of her eyes break with her sigh and spill.

When's the last time she'd _cried_?

“Hey. You're not good _despite it_. You're good _with it_.”

She laughs and it's tear filled as she rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand and then glances up at him. He's smiling, and she smiles too.

 _Fuck_.

“Did all this just come off of the top of your head or did you write it down and practice it in front of a mirror before coming to talk to me?”

He rubs the back of his head, “Bit of both, really.”

She blinks away the smile and completes the miracle as she reaches for his hand. Hers is snot covered and his is sweaty. A perfect match.

“I'm sorry, Rob.”

She'd missed the weight of it. The warmth.

“There's nothing to forgive, Dis. You needed space.”

“I did.”

“So it's all good. Okay?”

She doesn't know if it's all good. She doesn't even know if it's a _start_ of an all good. Maybe it's just an _okay_. Maybe it won't even be that.

But it's something, and it's a _start_.

“Okay.”

 

* * *

She comes home to a quiet, calm house. She's used to it: as quiet as her bones, calm as the sanctum she's always looking for. She takes her shoes off at the entrance and her jacket's folded over her arm: calculated and precise movements she does every time. Shoes by the door. Jacket over arm. Book bag over her shoulder. She no longer even acknowledges making them. It's a monkey on her back (and maybe today it went quiet for a while, but she's used to its hands to her throat as much as she wants it gone).

No matter: Frerin's on the kitchen floor, back to the cabinet beneath the sink. His eyes are closed and his head is rhythmically hitting the wood behind him, not too hard but hard enough to make the smallest of sounds. He doesn't open his eyes when he hears her move, the rustle of her book bag being placed on the floor. Then her footsteps. _Yellow_ , he decides. Like the sun.

“Hello.”

“You're back later than usual.”

“Ran into Rob. He caught me just as I was leaving campus.”

“You mean he _stalked_ you just as you were leaving campus.”

“ _Frerin_.”

“Sorry. Stupid joke.”

She twists her mouth to the side and his eyes remain closed.

“Did you get anything to eat?”

“I'm okay.”

“There's an apple on the counter.”

“I'm _okay_.”

“Suit yourself, then.”

“Are you high?”

A pause. When Dis turns her head slightly to look at her brother, he's opened his eyes and is picking at the skin on his left pinkie finger.

“No. I'm stopping. You know that.”

She doesn't reply and just leans back again, legs outstretched in front of her. He outstretches his too, and the side of his right foot brushes against the side of her left.

“How was your day?”

“All right. Took Serendipity out for a ride. Saw Thrain for a little while at lunch time. Balin and some other person came over to work on something. Thorin called.”

“How's he doing?”

“Fine. Whatever.”

Frerin rubs his face with his forearm. Out of the corner of his eye, Dis stares into space.

“Hey. What's wrong?”

Turned to look at her. Eye contact, for a brief second, and then Dis goes back to staring into space. She allows a brittle smile to trickle through the confusion in her head.

“I don't know. Today was weird.”

Frerin scoffs and attempts to echo her smile loud enough to make it strong, and not simple smoke and mirrors.

“Try using heroin, shit gets weird real fast.”

Christ, this isn't even a _vestige_ of a sense of humor.

She frowns at him, eyes narrowed, and his grin snaps his unshaved face in two. She has to look away to stop herself from smiling.

“This is _indecent..._ ”

“Hey, listen-”

“...but lost weight faster.”

He raises a finger and then lowers it. She slips her hand in the one he's just tucked back by his side.

“Shit, Dee. You got me there.”

“ _And_ I've been doing it for longer.”

“Okay. Then who d'you think went _crazier_ while doing it?”

Her smile bends at the edges where she's still trying to get a hold of herself. Oh, but _does it matter_ what you laugh about when every fibre of your mind is hell-bent on destroying you? Does it matter if they sit on the kitchen floor and laugh about being ill? They fight against the tide any way they can: at night they'll be curled up at the bottom of the ocean either way. They might as well laugh in their monkeys' faces.

“Hush, Frerin.”

“No, c'mon.” he slides along the floor so he's facing her.

“On a scale of none to Thrain Oakenshield, how crazy are you?”

“ _FRERIN_!”

She exclaims it, muffling her laughter with the palm of her hand, looking away in amused disbelief. Dis then leans her chin against her hand, elbow resting to her bent knee. She thinks, for a minute, and then--

“Fi... no. Seven.”

“Five or seven?”

“Listen, it's a warped criteria anyway.”

“Did you learn that in your statistics class?”

“ _Shut up_! How about you?”

“Oh, I am at _least_ a twelve. I can't even look dear _Papa_ in the eye.”

He exaggerates the final _a_ of Papa almost comically, a mock regency accent that sends Dis in another fit of giggles.

“How about Thorin?”

“Thorin's _undefinable_ , Dis. It'd be like trying to determine how crazy Thrain is, and they're the same bloody person.”

“Oh, now you're just being unfair.”

He shrugs and then he stands.

“Maybe a little. I guess he's as caught in this mess as we are.”

He fiddles with the radio in the counter space between the sink and the stove reserved for utensils. Dis looks at him curiously as he navigates wave after wave of static. He settles on a shaky song and Dis scoffs.

“Frerin, this is Wham!. I'm not listening to Wham!.”

But he's already grabbing her hands and pulling her up, and he twirls her around.

“Come on, I have to finish my cheering up routine with a _flourish_.”

“ _Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go_ is arguably the worst song ever written. It's also three years old.”

She begrudgingly allows him to dip her and haul her back up and then he lets her go and he twirls by himself, once. She frowns, arms crossed.

“You'll hurt yourself. Frerin. Frer. Why are you-- _stop mouthing the lyrics_. Frerin!”

“I'll _sing_ if you don't dance. C'mon.”

She frowns at him as he advances upon her, bobbing his shoulders up and down, “Wake me up, before you, go go...”

“I'll kill you.”

“Don't leave me hanging on like a yoyo,”

“Frerin.”

He ignores her, circling her instead, waving his arms and bobbing his head. When he starts snapping his fingers, “You take the grey skies outta my way, you make the day shine brighter than Doris Day,”

“We're in a kitchen. There are knives, you know.”

He hits the high note on “I wanna hit that _hiiiigh_ ,” and grabs her hands, twirling her around. She finds herself, quite frankly, defeated: there is no other option if not dance, and Frerin is laughing, somewhat breathless, shirt loose on his skinny back the same way her dress hangs down her shoulders.

When she attempts a few steps, her brother laughs,

and she laughs too.

 


	22. v

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for parental abuse and addiction mention. stay safe, as always. x

“Do you ever feel like you want to change every little thing?”

Thorin looks up from the morning paper at his sister sitting across from him. She's stabbing half a grapefruit with a spoon, repeatedly, and looking--

He'd say _bored_ , but he's bad at reading people.

Thorin glances away, thinking, and then looks back at her, resting his chin against the hand that's holding the spoon he's been eating his oatmeal with.

“Depends. What do you mean?”

“Don't you just, dunno-- look at yourself in the mirror one day and think, _this doesn't work_ , _this doesn't make me feel me_ , like you're just--”

“Staring at a stranger?” Frerin asks, walking in behind Dis: that's who he'd seen, walking in from the living room.

“Morning, Frerin.”

Not the voice he'd expected. Frerin stops halfway through the kitchen to square his brother up and down, from his felt slippers to the t-shirt and boxers he slept in.

“When did you come in?” he asks.

Dis sees the chance of actually _talking_ to Thorin for once in her life fizzle away as he looks up at Frerin and quickly swallows his oatmeal, a thick and heavy lump of a mouthful that trudges past his throat in the grimace on his face, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before answering.

“Late last night. Felt like spending a weekend at home.” Thorin takes a sip from his coffee and goes back to leafing through the paper. Frerin nods, still bleary eyed, and then pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He blinks the tiredness away, and the tongue heavy like cotton, and buries the tips of his fingers in his sleeves. He sniffles, then pours himself some coffee. Neither Dis nor Thorin notice the _shaking_ up until he has to put the coffee pot back down and it clinks a little louder than he'd want it to-- neither, however, look up, and he quickly wipes down what he's spilled with a rag. He then stares at the coffee as it floats in the mug he chose, looks up, stares at the tiles on the wall, sniffles again and sits on the chair on the side of the table that's between Thorin and Dis. Thorin watches him out of the corner of his eye. Dis still hasn't eaten her grapefruit.

“Aren't you warm?”

It takes Frerin a moment to realize his brother's referencing the fact he's wearing long sleeves. A pause, where he starts peeling an orange he picks from the fruit basket after having blown his nose.

“No. No, I'm fine.”

“You sure?”

Dis doesn't move as Thorin asks his second question, her hand hovering near her glass of water without taking it. She stares into space, and she does not move, refuses to take a sip, she waits, she waits, silent and quiet, and swallows slowly. Frerin makes the mistake of quickly glancing in her direction, meeting her gaze. A second is all it takes from her eyes to slip from blank to quizzical to accusatory. He simply shakes his head at her once and then brings his attention back to Thorin's chin.

“I'm fine. Just-- slept with the window open. Got chilly.”

Two birds with one stone: the sniffles and the sweater.

Dis bites her lower lip, head bowed, and plunges her spoon into her grapefruit. She tries not to gag as she shoves the first spoonful into her mouth, rage kissing her shoulders and keeping them safe as they tremble with the movement of her hands. Frerin doesn't notice: he focuses on trying to smile for Thorin, who tentatively smiles back, clears his throat and folds the paper. Obliviousness sits easy on his shoulders: if he'd noticed the quick exchange that transpired between his siblings, he'd probably feel, thin like the blade of a knife scraping against his throat, the uneasiness that comes with not being so _sure_ everything's all right, he'd notice how Dis flinches when he pushes back his chair and stands to walk out, paper nestled between his arm and side. He grabs the piece of toast his father didn't eat and stretches his back.

“Don't get yourselves into trouble.”

Frerin snorts, “No worries. We won't.”

“If he looks for me, tell Father I went out?”

Dis shrugs, “Sure. Where are you going?”

“Just thought I'd take the Superior out for a spin.”

“The 1934?”

He has to stop and stare at his sister.

“Since when are you-- since when do you... _bikes_?”

“Robert's been keeping an eye on them with Dwalin.”

Thorin pulls his head back briefly in assent, the blink chasing after the movement of his neck like a fox tripping over stones: “Oh. Right. Okay. Well. I'm off.”

“Have fun,” Dis quickly mumbles into her food, and once his footsteps fade swallowed by the closing door she nearly chokes on the bitterness. Frerin doesn't give her the time, because he speaks first and briefly louder than her anger.

“I still have... some tracks. That's why.”

Dis presses both hands to the table on either side of her plate as she stands: not loud, but forceful, as loud as the rot in her bones. When she curls her fingers her nails scrape against the wood. She hasn't finished her grapefruit: she's barely eaten half. And when she looks at Frerin, she is so _still_ the world outside feels like it's fallen silent, like they're the only one left, like the chasm in their chests isn't ready to swallow them whole, like they still have mouths to scream with, like they are anything, _anything at all_. (The ghosts who chose to live in the shells of their flesh are hard to chase away). Frerin starts staring at the wall when her chair moves and doesn't stop when she begins speaking.

“Funny. Because last week there were _none_.”

“That's none of your fucking business.”

“ _Excuse me_?”

Oh, for God's sake, we were dancing in this kitchen on _Monday_ , and we were _laughing_ , and why do things fall apart with the ease of castles of cards? She watches, powerless, as his shoulders slip and bend under the weight of the wind of her words. When he breaks eye contact with the wall it's only to find the hem of his right sleeve and tear at it with his left index and thumb. If she asks him to look at her no bone in his body will be safe. If she asks him to look at her no rib in his chest will be whole.

She doesn't.

(She is not their father).

“I _stopped_.”

(He doesn't touch it all day. Only in the evenings.)

“Show me your arms.”

To have to speak these words is a knife sharp enough to break her heart: the glass of her blood vessels like a spider up the back of her throat, it crawls up into her skull, behind her eyes, quiet and deadly, and she is mother and adult and little sister and she breathes and it is shaky like the foundations she always feels she is building her life on. And Frerin pulls his arms against his body and folds them beneath the table, hands on his knees, and he shakes his head and sighs beneath the sweater that's starting to make him sweat.

“Frerin.”

He shakes his head, and when he looks at her from behind his glasses they're fogged with his tears. “No. No.” A flicker, and then his eyes are back to the lapis lazuli earring in her right ear lobe. Her right, his left, mirror images that do not know how to find themselves across the glass. This is a world of people who do not know how to cross the distances between them. He thinks of raising his hand and pressing his fingertips to hers. He thinks of raising his hands and strangling himself. He thinks of pulling his sleeves up. He looks, and she's sat back down. He looks and he spreads his hands on the table as if he were pressing them to the mirror's glass and waits for the surface to crack, waits for her hands to break through, waits for the laughter of that evening on the kitchen floor. When the surface cracks he will find their blood. When the surface cracks he will know they're finally free. When the surface cracks he will keep them safe.

 _On a scale of none to Thrain Oakenshield, how broken are your children_?

Thorin pushes the 1934 Brough Superior onto the gravel pathway and the dirt smells of wetness, and the night's rain is like dewdrops on the backs of the leaves. He feels like bones again: badly adjusted, badly walking, lost in the expanse of the sky above him. It's large, he knows this, as he looks up while he lights himself a cigarette: as big as his life. As big as the world. As big as the quiet of the house behind him, and he stands near the bike with the stillness of a man trying to escape ghosts he doesn't even know exist. What he _has_ noticed, however, isn't hidden in glances or sighs: it's hidden in backbones showing against clothes and the looks of the dead, and the eyes of the dead in his sister's skull, and the words of the dead in his brother's throat, and how they both seem made of nothing, body like tightrope their souls are walking across on rickety knees. God Jesus and Mary, they've slipped from his grasp without ever being in it to begin with. To chase the thought away Thorin inhales the cigarette smoke like he hopes it'll make him live again. Thorin inhales the smoke and exhales, Thorin inhales the smoke and exhales, Thorin inhales the smoke and exhales-- _three times, like all things sacred_ , like the sky so blue it's crushing him, like the love in his heart he can't find anymore. He thinks of Dwalin, and his chest aches with how empty and numb it feels, and the panic is exquisite, unknown before, like prayers he cannot remember. _Non fugiamus ab bello_ the only scream in his ears that he needs. _Non fugiamus_ \-- We do not _flee_ , we do not _find_ , we do not _fuck_. We do _not_ , we do _not_.

He is trapped in patterns of metaphors he doesn't know if he wants to escape. He has only one way of describing things. Only one way of finding the sense in the madness. Bones are always glass. The sky is always blue. The weight is always breaking his arms. But he stops even before he's turned around to close the garage door-- how funny it is that such a small building compared to the rest holds the heaviest of hearts, the heaviest of weights, an endless number of beginnings and of ends (Dwalin shirtless, and the Roadster, and the cricket bat, and some of his mother's rose bushes that she planted so they'd grow up the wall. He can no longer remember what she said when she did, what comment she made about “chasing away the gloom”. He doesn't think he can even remember the sound of her voice anymore-- he remembers other things, like hands holding, and a handkerchief wiping the snot away from his nose, and lips kissing a skinned knee, and maybe her scent, but even the words she whispered in the depth of a sickbed are fading, again and again and again, and he is so _tired_ of chasing them like they're the only good thing he knows). He has to stop, he has to still his hands from pulling his hood down to put his helmet on, he has to twitch the cigarette between his teeth to let the ash fall, he has to wait, and he has to swallow and find himself unable to do so.

The roses have bloomed.

He walks up to them. They're sitting, white and shining with the remnants of the rain, proud in the midst of their leaves.

Roses.

Thorin thought he had lost the meaning of holiness: he thought it had shriveled and died with whatever love he ever thought himself capable of feeling. He thought it had slipped away from his hands the way he felt Dwalin slip out of his life, quiet like the shadows a passing car traces along your bedroom walls at night. Still, he's found it in the rubble, and he runs a finger along the base of one of the flowers, against the spot where the petal meets the stem, still green with the sinew and muscle and bone of the leaves. He pricks a fingertip and lets out a gasp when he does: red _blossoms_ , and never has _to blossom_ felt so much like the best word he could pick. The small pain expands like oil: up his finger, it stops at the base where the knuckle meets the palm. Meanwhile, the drop of blood swells, the drop threatens to stain the rose, the drop rests, balanced, between his skin and the air. He pulls his hand away before the white of the flower risks becoming pinkish red, and sucks on the tip of his finger, and dips his head forward to smell what he hopes will bring him home.

Frerin clutches his hands curled like iron boulders on the table in front of him. Dis is leaning her cheek againgst her palm, her gaze lost, her gaze quiet.

“I don't want to fight.” she says, as if it could ward off her demons.

“I know.”

Frerin's voice comes out muffled by the knot in his throat.

“I just want you to be happy.”

His bitter smile in response to her words brings his whole face with it, crumbling down the cliff into an expression that feels like nothing but anguish. He is trying to smile, but only for her sake, and all it does is make her hurt. She grabs his hands and he pulls them away.

“ _I want you to be happy too_.”

“Then _stop this_. Frerin, please.”

He stands and he squeezes her shoulder: he hesitates beforehand, though, and has to force himself to pull his hand against her body. The moment is as brief as it will be. The words weigh far too much to handle.

“Then _eat_. Dis. Please.”

Thorin runs his other finger, unblemished unscarred unhurt, against the rose. He caresses it, dips his fingers towards the base, up the petals, cups it in his hand like a dead bird he's just found by the pool. The rose makes no sound, the rose speaks no words, the rose just _is_. Still, he tricks himself into tricking his mind into thinking there's a whisper on the breeze, that the earth is coming to meet him, that the earth is coming to dress his wounds and heal him, heal them all, heal them from the tip of their toes to the deep, deep thrum of their beating heart.

As it is, the breeze makes no sound if not her breathing through the leaves. Thorin runs his thumb along the petals of the rose. One last thought, as friable and evanescent as the cigarette that's forgotten between his teeth, only that this time he makes the whisper turn to words (like on Parliament Hill, so many years before), and hopes that somewhere, somehow, they will mean something.

“Hello, Mum.”

And then he turns and walks back to the bike, puts his helmet on, hopes to forget his name long enough to breathe again.

 

* * *

She cannot sleep.

It is not entirely abnormal, nowadays: sometimes things scream in her ear endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. Sometimes she can bring herself to ignore them. Sometimes she can't, and those nights they beg for blood louder than anything she ever thought she could bear. Robert snores lightly next to her, sheets crumpled up beside him. She can see the outline of his bare chest in the light that filters from outside, the lapping of starlight and darkness that traces the patterns of his body like engravings on a copper slab. She could kiss him, if she wanted to: all she'd have to do is lean over, grab his mouth with hers. She could run a thumb along his cheekbone. She could smile, and let him sleep, and he would mumble something under his breath and the alarm clock reading 4 AM would be their only witness. She gets as far as pressing a palm to his naked chest: his heart like the rabbit beneath it, dig her hands through his bones and squeeze the air from his lungs. A kiss she cannot find herself able to give.

She cannot sleep, and it makes her feel less than human.

(Thorin stares at the empty space in his bed and knows that if he does nothing something will break beyond repair.)

Dis decides to get up, quiet movements of the quasi-dead. The almost-dead, the almost-somethings, how she hates this state of apathy she is trying to fight against, this endless clench and unclench of her hands, this endless quietness, the pit in her stomach that she tries to fill and finds that she cannot, but _she tries_ , recently harder than she ever has. Things fill, things ebb, things flow, things tumble down and then climb back up again, things find their secret names in the laughter her brother is able to tear from her. Funny things. Small things, precious things, things she keeps hidden in her hands.

How do you find the way you were before when you are almost certain how you are _now_ is everything you ever knew yourself to be?

Something has to change. _Something_ : she does not know what, in the quiet comfort of the darkness she is shrouded in. _She does not know what_. But something must give, something must change, something must rustle its way out of the dead leaves and into the light. Both her and Frerin, still and silent at the bottom of the lake must find a way to climb back to the surface, fill their lungs with air, find the way to reach the shore again, find the way to get warm again. Little steps, however: in Frerin's eyes that morning she learned how easy it is to lose footing (she herself loses footing almost every day, but worthiness is worthiness, and she will find it for herself even if it kills her). And so when Robert turns and curls his hand in hers as he sleeps she allows herself to be dragged against his chest, allows sleep to kiss reason from her eyes again.

What can you find, however, in a body you have never learned to love?

What is there that can change things, what is the wall of water that breaks the dam? She stares at Robert's back as he cycles down the path that leads to the tall property gates (the same one her brother ran down after almost making love the first time, chest heaving with sobs, and he _danced_ down it the morning of the night he _did_ make love, blue and gold so close together in his memories), and the timid kiss he'd left on her cheek lingers like warmth.

Warmer still, however, is the late-night thought that now, in the mid-morning light, she somewhat strains to remember. It is a hopeful thought, however, the outlined sketch of a feeling of freedom. To change the way she carries her name, and change the way she carries her bones. It will be hard: it is etched across her face.

She has her father's eyes and her mother's smile. On her face she can trace back the memories of a lullaby. She has freckles, a dust of them across her cheekbones and nose, that peek out when the sun shines and her skin manages to gather itself into the smattering of a reddish tan. No one else in her family has freckles: she scrunches her nose. The reflection in the mirror in her room does the same. Twists her mouth to the side: the image of her body follows. Index finger pressed to the space between her collarbones that peek from the oversized t-shirt she wears as pajamas. Her hair up in a ponytail.

She undoes it: her hair falls across her shoulders and frames her face. She runs a hand through it, and stares at herself in the mirror.

It's been long for as long as she can remember, dark brown (none of them inherited their mother's blond hair), sometimes auburn in the light (and only in summer). The face that looks back, wide-eyed and quiet, is one she knows all too well. Cheekbones, slightly sunken eyes, and cracked lips buried in worry. She runs a finger along the reflection of a scared and tired little girl, her own finger meeting her own fingertip, the illusion of a twin contained in a sheer surface of glass. Her eyes trace the frame of her hair.

It happens fast, too fast to allow herself to think ( _now or never_ , she decides): the hair goes back into a ponytail, and then her scissors come around it like an embrace, and then she shears it even more, careful not to accidentally snip her ears or the back of her neck.

A mess of badly, scraggily cut hair stares back. Once she's done, her neck and shoulders are free, and no bob obscures her cheekbones. A pixie cut.

Dis stares at herself in the mirror and finally sees someone _different_.

She stares at the large chunk of hair sitting on her dresser, still loosely held together by her hair-tie, and she looks back at herself in the mirror. A stray strand of hair is stuck to her cheek. She brushes it off, and then runs both her hands through what's left on her head. It is strange: the hair _stops_ at a certain point, there's no knots to untangle, the sensation beneath her hands is so different from anything she's ever felt. She ruffles it: it sticks on end at the top of her head.

She sees herself, hair sticking out every which where, and she starts _laughing_.

There she is, Dis Oakenshield: for a day she's uncovered herself underneath the mess. She can't stop it, can't help it, doesn't even want to avoid it. She just _laughs_ , and the laughter plays with the light and the dust hanging in mid-air.

“What's so funny?”  
Frerin's head appears, poking in through the door, in the reflection she's still looking at. Dis turns around on her stool, and is grinning. Frerin's face falls.

“Christ on a bicycle. You cut your hair.”

“Yeah. _Yeah_.”

She's still giggling, one knuckle pressed between her front teeth to try and not laugh too loud. Frerin looks baffled.

“ _What_?”

Her expression dwindles down to a simple, if not tentative, smirk, “I cut my hair, so what?”

“Thrain's gonna _shit himself_.”

“Why should he? It's just _hair_.”

Frerin sighs, a shaky breath, “I don't know. You're probably right. Sorry. I tend to overreact. You know how he is, doesn't deal with change that too well.”

“It's gonna be okay. _It's just hair_.”

As his sister turns to throw out the remnants of her now-sheared hair in the waistbasket, Frerin's shoulders tighten. He does one of his smirks, small and bitter.

“I guess so. I hope so.”

“ _Frerin_.”

“Right. Nothing to worry about.”

He stares at the back of his sister's neck, now naked, and rubs his mouth, squeezes his face with his hand. Eyes staring out the window, worry he can't really place in the bottom of his stomach.

 _It'll be okay_.

Lord, he hopes it will.

* * *

Still, when she walks past her Father's study later that evening it's with quiet worry churning in her chest. She's been catching glances of herself in every reflective surface she's passed next to, the thrill of seeing herself so changed electric through her stomach. Thorin had stared, puzzled, when he'd come back from wherever he'd been (Parliament Hill and two packets of cigarettes) and then simply shrugged and said it suited her, “I guess.”

Frerin tells himself his worry's unfounded. Still for once he keeps the door to his room ajar: just in case. Just to listen.

“Dis?”

His father's voice. His ears perk up, finger keeping his spot in the book he's reading.

“Yes, Father?”

Frerin swallows and feels the knot in his throat become thicker. Breath shallow and the sensation of the world about to break. He waits.

“What happened to your hair?”

“I just... cut it. Felt like a change.”

A heartbeat.

“ _What happened to your hair_?”

Frerin scrambles up from the floor he's sitting on and is out of his room. Dis at the door, Thrain standing, all the way across his office, behind the oak desk, behind ranges and ranges of mountains. Standing, one fist clenched knuckles pressed against the wood, his other hand cold and shaking beside him.

“Stay _out of this_ , Frerin.”

When their father speaks, Dis turns to look at him. She's not nervous, _not yet_ , which is good, in a way, but the tone put her off in a way she knows all too well. Sometimes you do something wrong, and his tone just _changes_.

“I just heard voices and came to check.”

“What I do is _none_ of your business. I'm your father.”

Frerin gives him a glance and then looks at Dis. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is _wrong_ , Frerin.” their father answers.

“I'm not talking to _you_.”

She doesn't know in which one the disdain is _thicker_.

“ _Frerin_.” and her tone is as sharp as their father's (but the light reflected on her blade is different: just a quiet, small _stay out of this please. Stay safe_ ). Frerin doesn't reply: his words die down without him having to say anything at all. He swallows.

“Did I give you permission to cut your hair?”

“She doesn't _need_ your permission. She's not your _poppet_.”

Dis closes her eyes, a small exhale. “ _Frerin, no_.” is a whisper.

“Well then perhaps your sister can speak for _herself_ , no?”

Her father's eyes drill into her, and she wipes her hands on her shirt, and Frerin stares at the corner where the door jamb meets the floor, opposite the one Dis is pressing her hand against. She lowers her head.

“I'm sorry, I should've asked first.”

“ _Dis_.”

Dis turns around, she whispers, “ _Please_. I am _trying_ to avoid this getting bad.”

“He doesn't _have_ to control you, Dee-- _Dee_.”

“What are you two whispering about?”

Dis sees her brother's jaw set like it's the heart of a storm.

“It's not your fucking business.”

“ _Frerin_.”

Oh, she sounds _desperate_. But right now he is more angry than her desperation will ever manage to quench.

“... _What did you say_?”

“You don't _own her_. If she wants to cut her _bloody hair_ , she can very well cut her hair. You don't--”

“ _What did you say_?”

Sometimes jumping from the burning building is the only thing you can do.

“I said it's none of your _fucking business_.”

He says it firm, and loud, and as heavy as the stones in his heart. He says it so there's no denying it. He says it because he curses at this man who calls himself his father, and does it because he knows he is no longer afraid to die, to burn. Frerin breathes. Frerin breathes, and walks back a few steps when his father crosses the distance between him and his desk and reaches out to grab his face. Thrain's clutching a book, picked up in fury. Frerin feels the ring carrying the family crest pressing against his jaw.

“ _What_. _Did you_. _Say_?”

“I SAID--”

Thorin's footsteps up the stairs, his brother's voice, “What's going on?” and then a pause, the tone lower, “Frerin, what did you do?”

The rage mallet hits Frerin's throat and breaks every bone, ready to make him _scream_ at his brother for betraying him that way-- but then Thrain lets go of his face. Dis seems to start breathing again, air blowing through her lungs like the first time in a thousand years.

“Tell him what you did, son. Tell your brother how you spoke to your father.”

“You're not my father.”

He blurts it out, and Thorin has to bury his face in his hands. When Thrain grabs Frerin's wrist, Frerin's body screams its way into his skin, recoiling like flames, recoiling like fire. But it is done. It is said, it is said, and his eyes prick with relief.

“You're not my father. You never were.”

When he glances to Dis, she's looking at him like he's signed his own death sentence, like he's murdered himself, like he's standing with his hands covered in his own blood. He wonders how dull his gaze looks. He wonders if he's stopped shaking.

“... _What_?”

“I said you're not--”

“Get out of my house.”

Dis, quick and sharp, at the same time as Thorin, “ _What_?”

Frerin bows his head.

“Good. Finally. _Finally_.”

“Frerin, no.”

He glances towards Dis and then walks, briskly, back to his room, past Thorin who's standing at the top of the stairs. He doesn't see Dis stare at her father whose face is of granite and terror-inducing. He doesn't see how she _tries_ to speak, how she tries to let _any sound at all_ past her lips and how she looks back at Thorin who doesn't know what to do, either. Talking. Maybe talking.

“Father, do not do this. Please.”

He's gone numb.

“You heard him, Thorin.”

“He didn't mean it. _You know how he is_ , he didn't mean it, please—”

“No. No, I fucking meant it.”

Frerin reappears with a duffel bag and a jacket, and Thorin has to blink.

“Jesus. Frerin. Frerin, c'mon.”

“No, no no no no no. I am _sick_ and _tired_ of this, I am-- I'm.”

He turns to Thrain instead of just pointing at him.

“I wish you'd died instead of Mum.”

It happens fast, faster than it should be, faster than he'll ever remember it.

The book never reaches him, though. It hits Thorin square in the face, splits his eyebrow open, his father standing inches from them. Dis feels like she belongs in Hell. Frerin finds his brother between himself and his father, and a trickle of blood drips down Thorin's face into his mouth. A book instead of a bottle, but the courage is the same.

Thrain lowers his hand, lowers the book. What Frerin sees makes him _retch_ : Thrain looks mortified. Thrain looks _terrified_.

“Thorin, I-- I'm so _sorry_ , I didn't mean to.”

Thorin feels the pain, like a single candle lit in a dark room, and he closes his eyes for a moment. His chest's heaving. He swallows.

“Of course you fucking apologize to _him_.”

“Frerin, _do not_ make this anymore difficult than it already is.”

Frerin's mouth goes dry when his brother snarls at him. It is then that he notices the small plastic sachet on the floor, in the space between the door to his room and himself, and he lunges to pick it up. What has he got to lose, anyway?

But when he moves back into Thrain's line of vision, he realizes he can still _break_.

“What is that?” Thrain asks.

“Nothing. I _said_ \--”

Thorin turns and stares at him, and now he's standing side by side with his father. He's still bleeding, and flinches when he wipes at his wound with his hand. He grabs Frerin's hand without speaking, and wrestles the sachet out of his grasp. Dis creeps up to stand next to them.

She's the first to find the courage to speak.

“You told me you _stopped_.”

Frerin clears his throat, “Well, I lied.”

“What _is it_ , Frerin?”

Thorin speaking, and Frerin wants to die. He wants to vanish. He wants this to _end_. He wants this to end. He wants a million things, and he can only have one.

He can have the truth.

“Heroin. It's heroin.”

“Jesus _fucking Christ, Frerin_!”

He disregards his brother's voice. All he does is stare at Dis, with her new hair that looks wonderful, all in all, and cheeks reddened by the tears that she's crying.

“I'm sorry.”

“You told me you'd stopped.”

“I lied.”

There it is. There it is, finally free, finally quiet, finally silent.

“I lied, Dee.”

“Get. Out. Of my. House.”

He doesn't bother asking back for the sachet. He doesn't even care, at this point, he still has some. But when he opens his mouth to reply, it's his brother that interrupts him--

“C'mon. Let's go.”

“Thorin,” his father seems to start, but Thorin shakes his head and roughly grabs Frerin by the shoulder. He is _fuming_.

“Your face is bleeding.”

“Shut _up_ , Frerin. Shut the fuck up.”

They are a grim procession, all four of them, up to the car. Past the roses, past the dampness, past the bike Thorin was about to park. Thrain has not let go of either the heroin nor the book, and Dis is hugging herself as if she could squeeze herself out of existence. When they get to the car, Dis has to break free. She grabs her brother's hands, “Don't do this. Please. Please.”

But Frerin pulls them from her, “I can't do this anymore.”

She's grabbing his face, “Please. _This is my fault_.”

“No, no,” Frerin's turn to hold her, Frerin who presses his forehead to hers, “no. No.”

All he can say, before the sadness takes his throat and makes it hers.

“No. Dee, no. It's not your fault--”

Thorin's voice, Thorin's eyes in Thrain's eyes.

“--It's not your fault.”

He glances to Frerin and there's the same amount of rage, “Get into the car, Frerin.”

“I don't regret what I said.”

Frerin says it to Thrain, one last bitter goodbye.

“Neither did I.” their father replies, “And consider yourself _lucky_ , boy. At least you didn't get to choose.”

( _The cane or the belt, Thrain_?)

“Get into the _fucking car_ , Frerin.”

He obeys his brother, and Dis flinches when Thrain places an arm on her shoulders as they drive away.

* * *

Frerins stares at his brother's knuckles, white as they clutch the steering wheel.

“Where are we going?”

“Shut up.”

Frerin recoils, “Excuse me?”

Thorin has to breathe once, then twice. The cut in his forehead's stopped bleeding, at least. It still stings.

“Dwalin's. Fuck.  _Heroin_ , Frerin?”

“That's none of your business.”

“That's none of my-- none of my--” Thorin has to inhale not to scream, “For fuck's _sake_ , are you insane?”

“I had it _under control_ , I had it--”

“Fuck. FUCK.”

“You're screaming.”

“ _Frerin_.”

Frerin kicks the dashboard in response, and he boils over, and the sea is wine-dark, and the sun is about to swallow the Earth.

“Pull over. Stop the car.”

“Frer.”

“Stop the _goddamn car_.”

“Shit. Shit. All right.”

Thorin obeys and Frerin catapults himself outside the minute the car's parked on the side of the road. There's a field to their left. He runs through it for a few feet, and then he stops.

And then he screams, loud and long enough for his voice to go hoarse.

Thorin stands outside the car, leaning against the roof. He does not move. He watches as his brother's shoulders heave.

* * *

Sanctuary can be many things. It can be a place, a thought. It can be a color or a smell. Thorin Oakenshield doesn't know much about any sanctuaries, save for one.

When the doorbell rings, it's Dwalin who opens.

MacFundin stares at the pair like he's never seen them in his life.

“What the fuck happened to your _face_? And when- when did you _come back_?”

“I would've... I would've _called_.”

Frerin scoffs and sniffles. Dwalin glances at him, then at the duffle bag.

“What's going on?”

He asks it calmly, because Thorin didn't tell him he was back in London.

“Dwalin, listen--”

“What's _happening_?”

Frerin answers for his brother who suddenly looks like he's aged a century, “Thrain kicked me out. Hit Thorin in the face with a book. Can we come in? I'd _love_ a cuppa.”

Thorin bites his tongue and closes his eyes. He hears Dwalin move, make room for them to shuffle inside, and it's all a parallel, their life will always be circle they're desperately trying to keep up with. He feels Dwalin's eyes drill into him, grey eyes like the storm.

Balin heard it all, and he's standing in the living room.

“I'll get you cleaned up,” Dwalin mutters. It takes Thorin a moment to realize he's talking to him.

When the bathroom door closes behind them, he guides Thorin to sit on the edge of the bathtub. He washes his hands and has to stop himself from asking too soon.

He asks anyway.

“When were you planning on telling me you were here?”

Thorin flinches when Dwalin runs a washcloth over the cut, “I'm sorry.”

“That's not an answer, Blue Eyes.”

Always so good at landing punches.

“I don't know. I'm sorry. That's the truth. I don't know.”

Behind the closed bathroom door, he can hear Balin say something. Frerin replies, and Balin laughs. Maybe nervously. Maybe not. Thorin can't tell, the sound is muffled.

“Hey, look at me. I gotta disinfect it.”

“It's fine.”

“ _Thorin_.”

“He's a heroin addict, Dwalin.”

“He's a... he's... wait. _What_?”

Dwalin lowers his hand that's holding the cotton swab. Thorin almost feels ashamed to have to look at him. He feels guilty. He feels responsible. He feels like so much now makes sense: the apathy, the quietness, the weight loss. Even the long sleeves.

“He's a heroin addict.”

Dwalin leans back against the sink. Just like that, the air knocked from his lungs.

“Fuck. _Fuck_. How long?”

“I have _no idea_ , I just found out. I just-- I just.”

Eyes lost for a moment. Eyes gone. Blue eyes.

“Shit. Dwalin. _This is my fault_.”

Dwalin doesn't know what to say because he cannot tell what he feels.

“We'll find a way to fix this.”

A scoff. His hand automatically reaches for Thorin's cheek, and he is, of all things, _relieved_ when Thorin does not brush it away.

“How?”

“I don't know. I might have to... make some calls. We'll fix this, though. We can fix this.”

When Thorin presses his face to Dwalin's chest, there is no longer any need for words. Mechanical, maybe, unexpected in the hollows of his bones. He does not know if this is where he wants to be right now, but Thorin clings to him, and the missing phone call falls to the ground between them like dead leaves. 


	23. vi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for brief mentions of addiction and eating disorders, jic. <3

Not that it should be any different, Frerin thinks, chin resting on his knees bunched up to his chest. Socked heels digging into the edge of the couch, and his fingers picking on the frayed end of his jeans. Not that _anything_ should be any different, but Lord it's been two weeks and everything _has_ changed. It breaks his heart, but there's rage and bitterness in his breast by the dozens and an anger he didn't think himself capable of having. Something, he doesn't know exactly what, is quickly about to come to an end, crashing into a wall, falling over the edge, and when it happens there will be no great sweeping eulogies nor declarations, no animals to lick his bones clean. There'll just be that: silence. And he doesn't know if he likes silence that much anymore.

He's not high, not right now at least, and when he stares at the torn edges of his nails, where the cuticles were bitten off and all that's left is angry red skin, he is suddenly reminded he is _real_. It is--

it is heaviness poured into his bones like concrete, the tips of his fingers as heavy as lead. The notion that those _are_ his hands and the notion that he _exists_ clash somewhere in his chest in ways that make him want to crawl somewhere dark and quiet and _forget_ , because what's one more mark on his arm if it's nothing but bruises anyway. Frerin sniffles and the weight next to him shifts when his sister moves to stand. She helps Balin with the teapot, he carries the teacups, and they sit back down, only she's moved to a chair and Frerin's on his own on the couch. Balin clears his throat and sits down where Dis was before.

Frerin's glasses sit on the coffee table (every good respectable home has a coffee table, even the ones that are rotten) and he can't see past the tip of his feet. No protection and still the tallest wall he could build himself: raw like a nerve that flexes in the open light of surgery, he cannot hide behind the comfort of glass, but he cannot find what he cannot see in the murkiness of his astigmatism. The sleeves of his flannel shirt are pulled up by hands he thinks he is by now aware are his. Not entirely, of course, but maybe just a little: his chest buzzes and the ringing expands in his ears. He thinks it suits the room well, empty and echoing with a number of words he doesn't want to listen to. He thinks it suits the tone well, with his body slack and torn, waiting to escape, waiting to slip, waiting to drown, _wanting_ to drown, frustrated frazzled, the friction too ferocious to feel. He figures that he might as well put his glasses back on. He figures that a smatter of an effort could me made: when he decides to allow the voices to ebb back into view, he has to bring himself to care and focus. Thorin's the first to emerge: he's sitting across from him. Dwalin, because he cannot sit still and will never be able to, paces behind him, covers the distance between the couch Thorin's sitting on and the dining room table a few feet from them, and then back, unlit cigarette to comfort his tongue. He stops and decides to place both hands on either side of the back of the sofa, hovering over Thorin's shoulders. Thorin seems to notice, and he seems to _tense_.

Frerin trails his gaze up Dwalin's tattooed arms and then allows it to stop someplace on his chest. He closes his eyes, he leans back, he lets his head hit the back of the sofa he's sitting on.

“Frer?”

His sister's voice that he ignores.

“C'mon, Frerin. It's you we're here for, after all.”

Thorin's tone is the thing that pries his teeth out of his gums one by one. He snaps his eyes open and feels everyone stick to him like nails through his chest, through his arms, through his throat. Balin's the only one who doesn't look: Balin's pouring him a mug of tea.

“Milk or sugar?” the eldest MacFundin asks.

“Sugar, please.”

Automated response when his brain's like acid leaking from his nose. He grabs another kleenex. Thorin notices the fresh tracks: Frerin doesn't bother covering, anymore. The secret, whatever that was (and it _was_ , oh, it was, panicked little trembles whenever he'd pull his sleeves up without thinking) has become something different entirely: it is liberating in the sick twisted way everything seems to be, to know that he can show them without--

Well. Shame is still there, black and sluggish, thick like poisoned blood. Shame doesn't leave. Shame's never left, this much is clear. Shame's always loved him, the same way it's always loved Thorin, the same way it's always held his sister's hands. No, shame hasn't left.

Interest, however, that one is gone or at least subdued, quiet like a mouse. Sometimes it tickles him, sometimes it doesn't, and he doesn't deny it when it comes, and he takes the time to greet it when it finds him, but it's become so _dull_ beneath it all. He wonders if it's _the heroin_ that makes him care so little if others know that he's taking heroin, or if it's the depression, or if he's just as selfish as his father says he is. He sees Thorin follow the marks to the crook of his elbow, where the sleeve finally begins, and Lord, he does not _care_.

Thorin's jaw, however, clenches, and he stands not before glancing first at Balin, then at Dwalin. He ignores Dis, despite her staring at him quizzical.

“A word, Dwalin?”

He asks it because he knows Dwalin won't say no, he asks it with thinly veiled rage because there's no use in hiding it anymore: everything else is barren. Everything else is burnt soil around them, everything else feels like it doesn't matter. Everything else, whatever they had, feels like it _died_ , the distance killed it and the pain. Dwalin stares at Thorin for a moment. He hesitates.

He follows. Balin leans back and Dis doesn't know how to react and Frerin smirks to himself, eyebrows raised.

“ _Yikes_.” is the only comment anyone makes, and it's his.

Thorin leaves the front door ajar behind them and decides not to meet Dwalin's gaze until he's _absolutely_ certain he can.

“Why the _fuck_ are there fresh tracks on my brother's arms?”

Dwalin lights the cigarette he was clenching between his teeth. He sighs.

“Listen. I've _known_ junkies. Ash was a junkie, remember? You can't have them quit all at once.”

“Dwalin, it's my fucking _brother we're talking about_!”

“Listen to me! Blue Eyes, listen to _me_! For once! _Listen_. _Please_! And have the decency to accept that _for once_ someone else might know _better_ than you!”

It's muffled, sure, but the others can hear it: they're not far enough from the door that their voices (Dwalin's especially) can't reach them. Dis shuffles in her seat, pries her hands from beneath her thighs where she'd hid them. She reaches out, and there is something that like strings on a puppet grabs her by the wrists and stops her hands, a fraction from her mug. _Don't drink it. Don't move. Don't breathe_. It widens her eyes, this voice so close to a scream she is ready to cry, this _thing_ that sometimes rears its heavy head.

_Fuck off._

Dis takes the tea (no milk, no sugar) that Balin offered to her ten minutes ago (it's almost cold by now, lukewarm at least) and swallows. Doesn't drink it, just holds it in her hands. Frerin notices.

“Tea's got no calories, Dee.”

She sighs, almost resigned, “ _Frerin_.”

He throws a hand up, dismissive and sarcastic and searching for a fight because there's no other way he feels he can get rid of the weight on his chest, “ _I'm just saying_.”

Thorin stares at Dwalin and Dwalin sees the contours of his jaw press against his skin as it clenches. He has to look away, somewhere else, his lips, his eyes, those _stupid_ , _stupid_ eyes. He settles for the scab over his eyebrow.

They match, in the twisted way life's decided to make them match: close but not identical. Fathers weighing like iron wedged around their feet. Bodies dotting the past like they've always been there. Fear where there's shame and shame where there's fear. Thorin's cheekbones under his thumb and his lips that moan sweet nothings.

It feels like it's never happened. It feels like there's too much blood on their hands now, it feels like there's a spine that's broken beyond repair, it feels like it doesn't belong to them anymore, it feels. _It feels_.

It feels so much Dwalin wants to let it drown him.

“It's _my brother_ we're talking about, Dwalin.”

“You know _nothing_ about this! Y'know nothing about heroin, how it works, how _addiction_ works, for fuck's sake--”

“Because _you do_?”

A pause.

“Yeah. _Yeah I do_. I've _seen_ it, Thorin. Because you don't grow up in fucking Crookston without _knowing how it is_! Not with Ian MacFundin as your fucking _father_!”

Frerin and Dis glance towards Balin who glances back at the both of them, one on each side (left and right). He stares into space for a moment and then he stands and grabs the tea pot and goes into the kitchen. Frerin follows him with his gaze, and sees him put the pot down in the sink and do nothing, just stare at it for a few moments. Then Balin straightens his back, and when he turns towards the living room Frerin doesn't look away. He might look at his chin, but he doesn't look away.

“I forgot to ask. Does either of you want more tea?”

“I've still got mine,” Dis calls out. Frerin glances at his cup (half empty) and then at the front door.

“I'll have some more if you make it, Balin.”

Balin smiles, “Will do, laddie.”

Thorin's staring at his feet. Dwalin's catching his breath.

Thorin bares his teeth in a hiss, “So when _are_ you planning on having him quit?”

There are no sorries to be said: the air around them will not allow them, will not consider them, will not leave them the space for them. Later, maybe, when the world has calmed down. When the world feels like it makes sense again, but Thorin feels like it never made sense to begin with. There's no home to come home to, he realizes.

“There's. Half an idea.”

“Half an idea?”

“A friend of mine. Name's Dain.”

“ _Dain_?”

“Lives up near Fort William. He's got a farm.”

Thorin pauses.

“What's-- what's his last name?”

“What? Why d'you care?”

“What's his last name?”

“Jesus, calm down. Goes by Ironfoot. 'M pretty sure his last name's Langròmach.”

“You mean Longbeard.”

“Yeah, that's what it means, that's what it-- Wait, _wait_. How'd you--”

“Did I ever tell you what Mum's last name is?”

Dwalin feels he should correct the tense, but decides against it.

“Isn't it Longbe... _oh_. _Shit_.”

“Yeah. Well. Technically. Mum's family's Scottish. Scottish nobility, I'm almost certain we still have a castle up there _somewhere_. Dain's my cousin.”

Dwalin laughs. Thorin isn't used to hearing it anymore. He has to stare at the car that drives by and hope he doesn't make the mistake of losing himself in Dwalin's dimples.

“And here I was, hoping I'd have _one thing_ where the Oakenshields didn't pop up in some way or form--”

Thorin can't tell if he's joking or not, but then Dwalin almost cups his cheek. But then Thorin flinches, involuntarily, and pulls back, and Dwalin stares at him like he's on fire.

Since when did loving each other become sacrilege? It always _was_ sacrilege, yes, but _this_? Since when did they stop dead in their tracks? Since when did they-- since when did they not know how to move? Something, gold-tipped red-eyed, a pagan god for boys with Christ around their necks, has sewn their lips shut ear to ear and if he could Thorin would dig through the last four years of his life and find the beginning of it, he'd find the summer breeze through his window, he'd find gravel against it in the dead of night. The way the _air tasted_ that summer, of hope, of freedom, of liberation in the arms of a boy, it never tasted that way again. The way he'd stare at the night sky from his window, slightly open to reveal the universe within, the way he'd find Dwalin's hands in the darkness whenever he reached out for them. That never came back. Summer, summer, summer, like every promise they made, he's learned it wasn't worth keeping.

So many _woulds_ , so many _woulds_ and _shoulds_ and _coulds_ and missed chances and trains they did not try to take and sentences left halfway and stopped and the thought that nothing is permanent and that everything is so precious and fragile _makes him so scared he could cry_. His brother is dying and he does not know how to stop it. His sister is vanishing.

When will it _stop_? Where does he find the strength to fight back?

When did he grow up into a mess of sharp bones and light eyes, when did violence and rage become the language beneath his breastbone, when did he find himself scrambling for answers in the ocean that his heart's become?

When did he learn to drown so perfectly?

Thorin stares at Dwalin's hand even as it pulls back from where it stopped and disappears into his pocket, and wants to throw himself at his chest until he learns how to break the ribs open again. Until anything he says will be forgiving enough for this silence. Until he finds himself again. Until he knows Dwalin still loves him despite all the blood he's spilling.

He'd never think love would become staring at each other against the backdrop of an October afternoon and wish that summer would leave him alone for good.

“--Guess I should've known before falling in love with ya, Blue Eyes.”

There's no time for Thorin to reply: the door opens, and Balin nearly hits Dwalin in the back with it.

“ _Jesus, Balin_! Watch it!”

“Sorry, sorry! But there's more tea if you want, boys. Also, come back inside?”

“Right away, Balin. Did you know about the farm?” Thorin asks as Dwalin crushes the cigarette butt against the wall and throws it into an empty flowerpot.

Balin nods as he makes way for the two, “We discussed it last night.”

“Discussed what?”

Frerin's nursing a mug that's a mix of fresh and old tea and he smiles at his sister's question.

“Dwals' got a friend. Dain. Up in Scotland.”

Dis shifts her position so her legs are crossed, her feet beneath her buttocks.

“And?”

“I'm thinking of moving up there.”

“ _What_? And leave London?”

Frerin sloshes his tea around: the fragments of leaves float at the bottom, darker than the liquid.

“Yeah.”

Dis looks at Thorin. She doesn't allow him the time to sit: her eyes, the full sight of her eyes chiseled from marble now that her hair is gone, now that there's nothing to hide behind, have petrified him in the middle of the living room.

“ _Whose idea was this_?”

Dwalin manages to slip past Thorin and find a spot on the arm of the sofa before she can catch him too. Thorin swallows, “I've virtually just found this out.”

“Mine, actually.” Balin says.

Simple. Dis stares, and Balin clears his throat.

“Frerin needs to heal. There is no way he will heal if he stays here.”

“But it's so _far_.”

Her voice flutters in the air almost childishly high. It's so _far_. It's _too far_.

“But he's _right_ , Dee. I can't get better if I stay here.”

Dis curls up tighter where she's sitting, one leg still folded beneath her body, the other barely finding room on the chair when she brings it up to her chest. The contour of her kneecaps against her tights, pressing against the thin layer of her skin, and her hands clasped together, webby and unsure. Barbed wire spine sudden and sharp through her back: if it were real she would be bleeding. This doesn't mean she isn't bleeding any less. She may act older than she is, she may look older than she is, in the way her jaw's already set like it's been broken by the world a million times, but there are moments, moments where she stares at her hands and lets her voice go low, where she almost allows herself to be seventeen, going on eighteen, a girl with a world that's spinning too fast. Thorin looks at his sister and sees her drag her pain around herself like tendrils, an armour of thin shoulders and ribcages, a game of vertebrae and bones that play at being clowns balancing on balls, and the circus goes clap, and the public roars like thunder.

“I-- Shit. I know. It's just. _Far_. And Thorin's away most of the time, and I'm--”

“You have us.”

Dwalin says it without even allowing her the time to question it. He says it with the warmth of an older brother offering comfort. He says it hoping it will be enough of a rope to hold onto.

Dis looks at him. He cannot read her expression, not yet. She is holding her cards to her chest, she is weighing her options, she is waiting to see what the offer is.

“You'll have me and Balin, and Thorin when he can. You have Robert, too. You'll be all right.”

She thinks of herself in the depths of Oakenshield Manor. She thinks of herself like a ghost that's already there. She thinks of the rooms that have been steadily emptying. She thinks of home and the way it's escaped its definition. She thinks about Frerin leaving and going so _far_ , and she feels like the rug's been pulled out from underneath her feet.

“Jesus.”

“ _Dis_.”

Frerin uses her full name. Frerin uses her full name, and it is the only thing he says for a full minute.

“I'm not arguing against it, Frerin,” and her voice is the voice of an adult again, “I'm just-- not exactly agreeing with it.”

Call her selfish, call her scared. Call her lonely in the depth of her bones.

“But that's why we're here, no? To find a solution.”

Thorin offers meager comfort, like always, because he just doesn't _know_ , does he? Because he never learned. Because he _angers her_ , because he drives her _mad_ , because she loves him, because she loves them _both_ , because love it or hate it theirs are the names she carries etched on every one of her blood vessels, because Valerie might have her lips and Thrain might have her eyes but her laughter is Frerin's and the voices in her head are twins of Thorin's own. Because they all share the same large, webby hands. Because the ghosts that have chosen to haunt them haunt them all three. Because blood is thicker than water. Because love is thicker than blood.

“And I suppose we found one?”

“ _Dis_.”

Again, heavy in Frerin's mouth, heavy in the raspiness of his voice, ever slightly louder than before. A hand thrown forward, a hand trying to find a grip on the slippery walls of her own voice.

Dis. Dis. Dis.

 _Listen_ , I beg of you.

“I'm not being irrational, Frerin. I'm just-- If we're all going to have a say in this, then I want to have a say in this too.”

“But I am _so tired, Dis_!”

Frerin exclaims. Frerin says it out loud. Frerin raises his voice, and it breaks towards the end like all things that rise too fast and too high, too quickly for the sun to not melt them clear off their bones.

Thorin sees it then: the gaze they share. The tension that slips from Dis' eyes and leaks to the floor like liquid gold, and in the middle of the room Frerin's creaking, snapping voice finds the air and turns it to dust-- in the middle where their gazes meet. All it takes for Dis is to _nod_ , and Thorin discovers how if there is no language for the words he shares every time he allows Dwalin to listen to his heart, then what his siblings share vibrates in tongues the human mind is not even allowed to comprehend.

Frerin sighs, and Dis nods, and Thorin understands his place will never be between them: it will always be behind and beside them, but between them would be sacrilege.

“I'm so _tired_.”

If he stays in London she will smother him, walls bending inside him to find the last heartbeats of his dried-out chest. If he stays in London, with the walls that always bleed his own reflection and the rain that drips grey and toxic, in the weight of a city that holds him in its palm, he will melt like the snow, he will break like concrete. Lands do not forgive as easily as memories do: walls remember tears and blood better than brains.

If he stays in London he will lose himself.

Growing up, sometimes, means unclenching your fists. Growing up means recognizing that the tug in your hands is not your soul being ripped from you, it is the sparrow begging to be let free. Sometimes the breeze demands sacrifices, sometimes the current must take its due. Dis opens her hands. Dis opens her hands, and she stands, and her upturned outstretched palms ask _may I_? and Frerin grabbing her wrists is the consent she needs. As he grabs her wrists she grabs his, and she sinks to the floor so they're eye level.

“Okay, Frerin.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm proud of you.”

The decision comes to him suddenly: it might be a gamble, it might be a miss. They might spit in his eye and snarl him away, the awareness of his mistakes and neglect bright and burning like a fresh bruise.

Or they might not.

He does not place himself between them: Thorin comes down next to Dis' side.

Frerin is the one who lets him in, lets go of Dis' wrist, presses his forehead to his brother's cheek. It's Dis who buries her face against Thorin's chest, who allows his arm around her shoulder. They bring each other into each other's arms, with small gestures and shaky breaths, heavy like they've been made of lead all their lives.

Not between each other.

Beside each other.

 


	24. vii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for discussion of addiction & mention (no graphic depiction) of drug use.

Frerin stares at Dis through the windshield. She stares back. She hugs herself and he doesn't know what to do. There's a face attached to his head, and that head's attached to his neck, and that's all he knows. He should, probably, do _something_ with it.

He's not really inclined to know what, though.

“All set?”

Dwalin peeks in from the open driver's side, hands placed on the top of the car, peers past his own forearms. It takes Frerin-- a moment.

“All set, Dwalin.”

“Last chance to remember if you forgot anything.”

“I'm good.”

A blink, as his eyes stumble from the dashboard to once again fixate themselves on Dis' hands, hugging her elbows, scrambling for purchase. And he thinks--

Christ, he feels like this is death and there's no turning back.

“Gimme a moment, actually.”

It takes courage. It takes all the strength in his bones, because emotions aren't... nice, not like this, not raw and ready to tear him apart: sometimes he is able to find them, but now isn't one of those times. Sometimes they deliver themselves in his hands too loud to control ready to be tamed. But most times, like now, it is so endlessly difficult to understand what they're trying to tell him.

“Sure.”

So when he opens the door on his side of Balin's small yellow car, he does it feeling lighter than he has all day. Dis falls into his arms like sunlight, and buries her face against his shoulder. He digs his hands into her hips, realer than he feels real, made of flesh and blood and the cloth of her clothes and his cheek against her hair and her arms around him, their arms linking them through their shared blood and its bubbling. It happens like in a dream. It happens like a lifeline he knows he can now hold onto. Dis feels her brother's arms around her, and she feels like if she does not cling to him he will become less real than a dream, he will become as evanescent as their mother, as difficult to pin down, as difficult to find in the fields of the memories she's been making for herself. She knows it's a ridiculous thought, there's no way she could forget him, besides it's just a few months, maybe, hopefully, enough for him to find it again in the mess of threads that his mind has become. Robert stands behind her and Balin waits next to him, walls ready to hold her up, the soil she'll need to plant her roots inside, rebuild piece by piece and moment by moment. Thorin had to go back to Bulford, and his goodbye to Frerin was as messy and awkward as was Frerin's flinch when he patted him on the shoulder. Still he is trying: they are _all_ trying, in their own way, to save what is salvageable and let go of the rest.

But healing is a process she has decided to take upon herself, as large as the blue sky above them.

“I'll be okay.” she whispers, and knows she will.

Hugs stop the world, change the world, make and break the world. Hugs shatter ribcages and spines, hug free lungs of phlegm, hugs choke and drown and make breathe and dissolve destroy bring back to life. Hugs, and all the hugs they've shared, their bodies hurtled towards each other like stars through the empty of space, each other's moon. A blink of an eye, a moment, a struggle to hold back the tears: they are nothing like that, they are, they are one and the same and hands so similar their eyes alone could find them in the crowd.

Hugs can teach even the oldest lungs to breathe again.

“I know,” he whispers back.

“I'll miss you.”

“I'll miss you too.”

He smiles, choked by the tears he didn't know he was holding back, “No, no. C'mon,” she whispers it quiet, pulling back so she can see his face. He smiles from behind his glasses, “I fucked up.”

“You're fixing it.”

“Still made that mistake. Still fucked it all up.”

“No.”

“I'm wired _wrong_ , Dee.”

Dwalin sighs at this, low, still leaning against the car, shoulders sagging. Frerin's sister smiles with all the tenderness the world has to offer and more for this brother treading through the stars when the rest of them all bound to the earth and always will be, “No, no.” she whispers, brushing a curl from his face, “you're _exactly how you should be_.”

He buries her in his arms, she buries him in hers. For a moment the world stands still and grants them the holiness of simple love, and time stands by, and the world is the world and nothing more, and nothing spins without us wanting it to.

“I love you.”

“I know, Dee.”

“Exactly how you are.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Frerin, we gotta get going,” Dwalin says it so low, so quiet, so small, scared of breaking what's here if he talks louder than an apologetic murmur. Frerin turns towards him.

“Right. Sorry.”

“No problem, Frerin. Off we go.”

Dis squeezes Frerin's hand as he moves, and holds it until he's completely turned and his walking feet delicately pry him from her grasp. He wordlessly slips into the car, closes the door behind himself. He stares at her past the glass again, far away again, separated by the world from the world again. He is a universe in his own right, and something so large could never really fit in such little skin. She stares at him, and her darkness moulds itself to welcome his.

“Well then. Let's go.” he says, and brings his knees up to his chest, “Mind if I smoke?”

Dwalin nods, “Just roll down the window, please, Balin hates the smell of it. Mind if I use the lighter?”

Frerin hands it to him and Dwalin lights himself a cigarette before pulling out of the driveway. Frerin gives Balin's home a last lingering glance. Then he turns his head and swallows.

“ _Road trip_.” he says, the flatness in his voice the whole extent of his joke. Dwalin glances at him and shakes his head into a smile, “You're gonna spend nine hours with me, lad. Sorry about that.”

Frerin inhales, blows out smoke, leans his head back, and finally shrugs.

“I've spent nine hours with worse people.”

“Is everything all right, Dis?”

Balin asks it as they watch the car pull out of the driveway. It is a rhetorical question, one he knows asking is ridiculous, one he asks anyway to just fill the silence, it seems, and just try and make things right. Dis shrugs, so bloody similar to her brothers. Not bitter, just a shrug. Robert eyes her and waits for her answer. She is at the center of the interlocked web of their pursuing gazes. Balin knows there is a rhythm to every heart, a pattern to every pain: time means giving meaning to it. Time means allowing Dis the comfort of her slowness. Robert hasn't learned her cracks yet, he hasn't earned that knowledge yet: for now he waits and takes what he is given, and it is already bright enough to satiate him with laughter. He does not need anything more than her freckles, and she does not need anything less than his palms.

“Am I okay? The brother I've spent all my life with is moving to Scotland because he needs to recover from a heroin addiction, I'm, I think, finally coming to terms with having an eating disorder, and my eldest brother killed a man for me with a cricket bat. Things could be better. Things could be worse.” she turns to Balin, and she smiles, eyes shining with an age she should not feel inside her bones, “But I won't say I wouldn't refuse tea, Balin.”

Learn to live with pieces missing. Learn to know where the new pieces will fit. Learn to know. Know you know nothing. Learn to know that, too. Learn to let things heal. Grow, as painful as it is. Some things are harder to understand than others, some things have sharper horns and sharper claws. Some things, not all. Just some (and often the most important things). She has to know how to live without the comforting weight of Frerin's existence in the corner of her mind, tucked to the right, his room to the left if you go up the stairs, to the right when you turn to look at Thrain's study's door. It's empty, and she's walked by it every day, and now it's just her and Thrain's quiet most of the time. She taught herself to learn that Thorin's absence from the home wasn't really that different from his silence or from the time he spent away at college, but the hole in the air that's shaped like Frerin isn't exactly a thing she feels she'll get used to soon.

He's just a phone call away. But still. But _still_ , the hallways of Oakenshield Manor are hers to map on her own now. Books to read on her own now. Her stomach grumbles, and she quiets it with a prayer. Summer above her, breathing its last into autumn: the sun won't last long now. She will make it last, she thinks. In Robert's smiles and the stories she'll pry from Thorin when he comes home, and the phone calls she hopes Frerin will not forget to make. She will learn to let things heal.

Oh, she will fight _this_ , whatever this is, this darkness and dread and destruction, she will fight it with every inch she can.

Balin nods, once, and her smile infects his face, “Right away, Dis. Robert?”

Robert clears his throat and rests a hand on the small of Dis' back, “That'd be lovely.”

 

* * *

 

Frerin doesn't say a word until they're up to Salt, Staffordshire. Dwalin pulls over into the parking lot of a pub and Frerin squints at the sign.

“The Holly Bush Inn.” he says.

The words stick to the roof of his mouth and come out quiet and slow a second time, “The Holly Bush Inn,” he repeats to himself. It makes his tongue curl at the tip, and he snickers. “The Holly Bush Inn,” Frerin says a third time, still with a smile.

“What's so funny?”

Dwalin is... he's not precisely _tiptoeing_ next to him as much as walking right behind him very carefully, making sure Frerin doesn't fall, ready to catch him if he does. There are things he remembers and recognizes: Frerin's always tapped his finger against his face, often under his right eye, against his cheek, more so when he'd get nervous, and he remembers seeing him do that when he was a child and he'd catch him around the house. There is, of course, the missed eye contact and the tight shoulders. Other things? Other things are simply _familiar_ , warm in his chest, like the knees bunched up against his sternum, picking at his sleeves, and the way he always seems like the world's about to break beneath his hands.

Oakenshield children, through and through.

“Nothing. It sounds nice.”

Frerin, who seems to be nothing and everything all at the same time. Who's snarky and bitter and sharp and scared, and also so _quiet_ , silent in watching the countryside go by.

“Suit yourself. Lunch's on me, Frer.”

Frerin walks in front of him, dragging his feet along. Dwalin rolls up his sleeves, ratty old sweater that used to be Ian MacFundin's that he stole and never gave back, still smells of Scotland and his soul and his shitty aftershave and bad weed and memories stitched between the cloth and his skin. There's holes in the sleeves he slips his thumbs through, and one he cut himself and the other was burnt there when he was lighting a spliff back in the squat in SoHo, and all in all it smells of many things, and mostly it smells of himself, whatever that is and means anymore (he used to think it was a mix of all the shitty smoky bars he'd been in and Thorin's skin, but now both have drifted away and are locked between his palms, small enough to hide, small enough to trick himself into forgetting).

“Mind if I use the bathroom beforehand?”

“Sure. Just don't take too long,” trying to imply things that are far from easy to imply. _Don't get high_. _Or too high._

Frerin doesn't look at him, “I won't.”

* * *

 

Frerin sleeps for an hour after lunch, head pressed to the car window, hands curled in his pockets, sniffling in his sleep, that's the only movement his body allows itself to do. If he squints and glances to the side, Dwalin can see his chest slowly rising and falling, but it's so brief it's almost an illusion, it's so brief he has to convince himself, for a whole two minutes, not to stop the car _just_ to check if he's still alive. He lights himself another cigarette, rolls the window down, and watches the road as it slips underneath the tires of the car in front of him, over and over and over. The clouds roll above them, grey and heavy, sinking the sky into silence.

“You still fucking my brother?”

Dwalin turns and stares at Frerin for the few seconds he can allow himself before having to look back to the road. The boy's still leaning against the window, and his eyes are still closed, and he's still sniffling, hovering between nodding off again and maybe being a little more alert. The implications of what he's said, however, _those_ are interesting, if not awkward, if not maybe almost comical. He'd laugh if he wasn't so surprised, if he wasn't so tired. If the idea weren't so _bizarre_ , and the thought of terrified, terrified Thorin so ingrained in his mind. _No one must know_. Such _lengths_ to ensure that-- and yet here they are. And yet here comes Frerin's question. Dwalin decides to focus on the road and avoid the feeling his bones have been stripped of muscle, and all that's left between his muscle and his organs is the eternal vacuum of space. Well then.

That clears the air, all in all.

“How did... how do you--”

Frerin shrugs and crosses his arms, “It's not, I mean, it's not exactly a _secret_? When he's home you're always with him.”

“We could just be friends.” a beat that doesn't fool anyone, “Does Dis know?”

“You don't have to protect him. I won't tell anyone.” Frerin clears his throat, “...'course she does.”

Dwalin has to pause and collect his thoughts, “I'm not... protecting him. I'm just _saying_.”

Then comes more silence, crystal clear like water you can dip your hands in. Frerin's resolved himself to nodding back to sleep, when Dwalin says, small and quiet, “No. We haven't in a while now.”

He's never heard Dwalin with a voice so small. Frerin has to open his eyes, and Dwalin's staring at the street and not really _seeing_ it, and MacFundin swallows. God knows why he's decided to bear it all here. God knows why he's picked Frerin. God knows, God only _fucking_ knows.

“I'm sorry.” his voice must sound as fake to Dwalin as it sounds to his own ears. Like a record. Like a scripted word. Is this how they do it? How normal people who know how words go? It must be. He doesn't know. It must be.

“It's okay. He left for Ireland for six months. That's a long... time, to be apart.”

 _Ireland was a while ago, though?_ Frerin thinks about asking, and then decides not to. He opts for something flavored entirely differently-- “Things grew... _cold_?”

“I guess.” and the he's tilting his head to the side, and it's not the reaction Frerin expected, at all, he tried to do humor after all, but all Dwalin says is, “Can we not... talk about this?”

\--which, well, also makes sense.

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

“Not a problem.”

A longer pause, this time. Frerin has to weight it carefully to decide if the conversation really _is_ over, or if Dwalin's just thinking. He waits, and when he opens his mouth to speak is exactly when Dwalin opens his own to speak. They both make a small sound, and then notice the other has started talking, and both fall quiet. There we go. Frerin clears his throat, Dwalin goes back to driving.

“You first.”

“Ah, no. Come on, Frerin. What did you want to say?”

“You first.”

Dwalin clenches his jaw shut and pauses. He doubts whether he should say anything, and then he decides he does. He owes this to Thorin, maybe, or maybe he's also worried. Maybe he's more of a mess than he'd like. They don't have time to stop by Glasgow, do they? No. No, he'll have to call her like any other normal person's always done. Call a friend, don't let the years bloat like the air when it's brimming with the scent of an oncoming storm. Other people would have said bodies. He's decided not to allow himself to think that way.

“Does your father know?”

His brain, it seems, has decided there's no use in waiting. Dwalin spits the words out and then clutches the steering wheel. The leather creaks beneath his fingers. Frerin stares at him.

“No,” he says plainly, before turning his head back to stare outside the car window, “Thrain doesn't know.”

“Thank you.”

A shrug, and Frerin closes his eyes and wraps himself back in the armor of his own arms around himself, his knees to his chest, uncomfortable and stinging and painful, sinew tense and bent, but _his_. His position, his hands, his feet, his throat that swallows, his eyes that close, his last final sniffle, his whisper, “You're welcome.”

And then the realization washes over Frerin like wine dribbling from his mouth: he does not think he will ever come back to London. And if he _does_ , if he finds enough of himself in his mother's land, in the land that took his brother's heart, it will be as changed and transformed, unmade and remade and new. Different.

But truth be told, he doesn't know what different is.

* * *

Last stop before the final stretch. Dwalin emerges from the service station bathroom, and Frerin finally decides what kind of chocolate he wants after a long, slow deliberation with his glasses perched on the bridge of his nose and his hand placed underneath his chin: milk, caramel filled. He manages to pay before Dwalin reaches the counter where the girl, chewing gum, rings up the price for the bar, quick enough to avoid having MacFundin pay for something _yet again_. Dwalin catches up with him at the front as he's peeling the wrapper off like a second skin, dissecting the sweet underneath in tiny gooey squares, “Hey there. Want anything?”

The girl stares first at him and then at Dwalin, squares them top to bottom, the well-dressed sniffling mess and the punk with holes in his sleeves, and they must make _quite_ the pair. Frerin smiles at him and awkwardly waves the chocolate bar, “Already taken care of, thanks.”

Dwalin drowns, “Oh, come on.”

“Want some?”

Dwalin pulls out his own wallet as he pays for the bottle of water, “No thank you. Not much for chocolate. I'm more for biscuits. Thanks, love,” he smirks and winks at the cashier as she hands him his change, and Frerin sees her cheeks blossom with blush.

“Jesus Christ. They really _do_ all fall at your feet,” Frerin comments after popping a square of chocolate into his mouth while they're walking to the car, the wind making his jacket flap, “I can see how hard it must've been for my brother.”

“What can I say, they like me even with the scar.”

Frerin snorts, “Scar adds a bonus, goes with the big boy charm. Mind waiting for a second?” as Dwalin opens the car, “gotta run to the bathroom real fast.”

He stops, though, when Dwalin's shoulders fall, “I'm not letting you get high. Once at lunch was enough.”

“I didn't say anything about getting high. Maybe I just have to use the bathroom,” the coldness of Frerin's tone, however, says otherwise, in the way the bitterness curls in the ice of every word he's just spat. Dwalin shakes his head.

“You see, that's the problem with drugs. You lose people's trust. You told Dis you'd _stopped_.”

Frerin narrows his eyes and swallows the last of his candy, “One, this isn't a conversation I want to have in a parking lot, and two, it's certainly not a conversation I'd want to have with _you_.”

“Well you're having it with me, because your father doesn't care, your brother's a coward and Dis loves you too much to say anything.”

Frerin scoffs, “Believe me, she's not scared.”

“Frerin, you understand why we want you to stop, yes? This'll kill you.”

“ _I didn't have myself driven halfway up to fucking Scotland just to be pontificated to_.”

He wears anger like a second skin, beneath which he can forget every inch of himself. Angry is good, better than apathy, but nothingness is better.

“This isn't about-- Listen. Listen. I'm not judging you, I grew up with an addict, I know how shit this can be. I don't judge you. But I've seen friends, all right, wasting away until they just took _too fucking much_ and dropped dead.”

“I've never shared needles with anyone, if that's what you're worried about. I don't have friends anyway. My blood's clean.”

Frerin sees Dwalin's top lip twitch and MacFundin stops himself before he topples into an argument this isn't the time or place to have. _Tainted_. He clenches and unclenches his fists.

“That's good, that's good. You still have to stop.”

“I'm not hurting anyone. _I had this under control_ before shit with Thrain got--”

“You're hurting yourself.”

And then Frerin _recoils_. Dwalin sees it begin in his knees, move up through his hips, the movement into his chest and whipping his neck back, in his face that looks disgusted for a moment, then confused, then defeated. There is a moment where Frerin grimaces: a smile doesn't have room on his face, can't find its breath in the sticky bitterness.

“... _so_?”

So. _So_. Like he's bodiless, like he's matterless, like he's the piece of the puzzle you can forget. Dwalin has to pause, and sigh, because he realizes there Frerin isn't looking to heal for himself. He's doing it for someone else, fitting his bones back in place because others will hurt if he doesn't. Because he has to, not because he wants to. He has been given the order and he obeys, a command he knows he has to follow. Frerin looks away from Dwalin's right shoulder, and licks his lips to not sigh.

“Dwalin, I'll feel sick if you don't let me.”

“Shit.”

“Please.”

“I know. I know.”

Dwalin rubs his face with his hand. He makes eye contact with him for a moment, and then nudges at him with his head. Frerin seems to unravel, hands delved deep in his pockets again.

“Thank you.”

“Frerin. I told you, I don't-- judge. It's okay. You're okay.”

Frerin stops in his tracks and turns around. He shrugs, both shoulders raised in mock apology turns back again, walks back into the service station.

* * *

Dwalin keeps him hovering in the corner of his eye, like a ghost or a shadow or a scared little boy that's staring into space, a moment away from falling asleep. Frerin sniffles. They take an exit, Fort William, and the motorway becomes a normal road, and parts of both of them refuse the relief they're feeling for different reasons.

Driving nine hours is hard.

“Here we are.”

“ _Yay_.” Frerin mutters, and tugs at the sleeves of his jacket. He grins at Dwalin and is utterly empty, and Dwalin smiles back.

“You'll be all right, Frer.”

“Moving in with a person I've never met in a place I've never been to just because I'm a fucking junkie.”

“Come on. Frerin.”

“Not a lie. Everything I touch does turn to fucking _shite_ , Dwalin, I thought that much was obvious.”

He used to smile with his jokes, used to manage to grin with his self-deprecation, inject a hefty dose of nothing with his laughter. Now he can't, as simple as things be, now the empty's too large to control. And then he buries his face in his hands, leans over, and presses himself to his knees.

“You all right?”

Frerin keens in response.

“Okay then,” Dwalin pulls over and stops on the side of the road.

“I'm all right,” Frerin mumbles from the comfort of his knees. His voice however takes on a shade of breaking as does the groan he lets out right after it, and Dwalin doesn't know where to put his hand. He lets it hover over Frerin's back, tempted to place it there, and then just lets it sit on the back of the seat.

“What's going on?”

“I'm okay.”

“Like Hell you are. Frerin. _Frerin_.”

Frerin turns his head, still on his knees, so Dwalin can see his face and he manages to stop himself before he forces himself to also make eye contact. Still, he allows himself to grin and raises both eyebrows. Dwalin is starting to hate the way the boy rearranges the crumbling structure of his face into a smile every time there's the risk of it showing anything to him that isn't blank: every smile that builds up a layer, every inch of a grin that just makes his skin thicker, every forced quip that only makes his voice grow more strangled. Frerin opens his mouth, “I'm scared.”

He's not asking anything, not pleading anything, just expressing a thought, just letting Dwalin know. He's scared, no comfort needed. Dwalin pulls his arm back and rests both hands in his lap. The carseats creak as they move.

“It's okay to be scared.”

“Didn't say it wasn't, MacFundin.”

Frerin straightens himself up, rubs his forehead and closes his eyes. He clears his throat and shakes his head, “Sorry about that.”

“It's all alright.”

Frerin scoffs, eyes still closed. He stares at dusk as it blossoms along the countryside, and the quietness they've always been trapped in, and the scent of summer as it dies.

“I fucked it up.”

“Worse people have done worse things.”

Frerin sighs at this, “So what, it evens it out?”

“It makes it more bearable.”

Frerin sits at the bottom of the pool and watches the light dance as it ripples across the surface of the water. The water's filled his lungs at this point, to the brim of his tired clenched mouth, the water's become what little blood he's allowed himself to keep inside his veins. The water's become everything he knows himself to be. He's learned it well, this art of drowning, he's learned it so well he doesn't know how to live without it. It is a comfortable penance for the sin he has branded upon himself, the sin of existing, of demanding, of being loud and imposing and _himself_ , the quietest there is, demanding to be seen when he cannot even look others in the face.

He lights himself a cigarette.

“Roll the window down.”

“Oh shit. Sorry.”

He quickly does, smoke milky in the evening air, seeping into his mouth, crawling down his throat, clambering back up through his nose with an exhale, slips through the crack the car window has to offer. Frerin leans back.

“Let's get this over with.” he finally says, not entirely believing it, his heart feeling all in all like a tired trapped animal, begging him to stop.

“Okay.”

“And Dwalin?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Dwalin has to stop before starting the car up again. He furrows his brow.

“You're welcome, Frerin. You're welcome. Now care to bum a cigarette?”

Frerin scowls, “We were at a stop _three hours ago_ , did you just forget to buy some?”

“Maybe. C'mon, kid, I drove you all the way up here.”

“I'll tell Thorin. Have you give him the money you owe me.”

“You barely even talk to your brother.”

Frerin snorts, the first genuine smile in hours, and then wordlessly hands him the packet.

* * *

“Don't run the chickens over.”

“What? _Fuck_.”

Dwalin slams down on the brakes and stops a few feet away from the hens as they strut across the dirt road. Above them, the sky folds itself in layers of trembling clouds, the promise of an oncoming storm. Frerin stares at the birds as they waddle across, strutting about in their proud brown feathers.

“You know, there's a punchline waiting somewhere here.”

“Don't you _dare_.”

“Hey. They _did_ get to the other side. Why d'you think they crossed in the first place?”

Dwalin glares at Frerin, and Frerin hides in the endorphins of his own sheepish grin. Every time he breathes he feels like he's flaking away with the ash of the cigarette he's just stubbed out in the car ashtray.

“Come on, you're at the end of this tedious journey. Almost free.”

“I have no idea what's happening, but I gotta admit I liked you more when you were stoned outta your mind, lad.”

His accent's grown stronger. Frerin acknowledges this with a curious tilt of his head and doesn't comment on it, but Scotland rests, pure and true, loud between MacFundin's tongue and teeth, much louder than she is way back in London.

“Thank you for not killing the chickens!”

The shout comes from ahead of them, all the way down to the stone house at the end of the path. The door swings open as the wind picks up again, grey and blue like the skies overhead, and blows the man's hair over his face, red, shoulder-length. He begins limping, not towards the car but towards the chickens, carrying a pair of sticks with ribbons attached to the end of them, a dish towel thrown over his shoulder. Frerin stares at him, utterly puzzled, before Dwalin starts laughing low, deep in his chest, and climbs out of the car as the man circles his bobbing chickens and starts attempting to herd them back towards the house. Frerin follows Dwalin out of the car, more curious than anything.

“You'll never make it, _Ironfoot_.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, MacFundin, and come over here and help me. Oi, you too, lad. C'mon.”

Frerin stares, terrified, first at Dain chasing after chickens and then at Dwalin standing outside of the car. Dwalin briskly gestures at Frerin to follow him and then comes up next to Dain as he flaps one of the ribboned ends in front of a chicken's beak, spooking it back to join her friends in the approximate curve he is trying to have them make back towards the coop they've clearly just escaped from.

“MacFundin, circle 'round and try keeping them going, spook anyone who tries to get away. You-- Frerin, right?” Frerin nods, not knowing what else to do, “you go and do the same, but on the other side. We gotta get these ladies back in before it starts raining. Thunder must've spooked them outta the roost.”

“Forgot to close it?”

“ _Maybe_ \-- shit, MacFundin, watch her!”

The first chicken makes a run for it almost immediately. Dain wags his ribboned stick at her before she gets too far and she anxiously clucks away from him, only to be ambushed by Dwalin on the other side. The second one dashes straight ahead, and Frerin's mind isn't foggy enough to not allow him to stop her before she manages to make her great escape. Chicken number two and three manage to stay on the path, lucky for everyone, and chicken four hangs behind a little, but is soon scooped up by Dain who, after having handed one of his sticks to Dwalin, carries her back to the coop next to the barn. He frowns at the open hatch and at the other six sleeping peacefully inside.

“See?” he asks chicken number four, “you should all do better. Look at your sisters, all peacefully asleep. C'mon now, in you go.”

Chicken four clucks back in reply and when he lets her go she flutters into the open space in front of the coop and then moves to nestle back up in the roost. The other three follow her, and Dain finally latches the gate shut.

“Well then. All set.”

He grins at Frerin then, and extends a hand that Frerin doesn't take, “Welcome to Iron Hills Cottage, lad.”

* * *

Frerin nurses a mug of hot cocoa he doesn't think he'll be able to swallow, and wonders why people always offer other people drinks when they want to be sociable. He doesn't want the hot chocolate, his stomach's already a mess as it is, a tight solid ball at the bottom of his tummy. He simply nurses the mug, and listens, sitting on the living room windowsill.

Dain leans back and sighs, his prosthesis, taken off, leaning against the chair he's sitting on, a hand absent-mindedly massaging his left limb. Frerin knows he's looking at him. Dwalin takes a sip of his beer.

The storm hasn't hit yet, but the sun's sunk well beyond the horizon. Still, its light lingers.

Frerin decides staring at the dark field is his best bet. Balin's car stares back at him in the driveway in front of the house. The large kitchen windows give towards the barn, which is why Dain was able to see the chickens escape in the first place, and Frerin can see them out of the corner of his eye from where he's huddled in the living room-- there's no walls that separate it from the kitchen.

“Not much of a talker, are ya, lad?”

Frerin glances at Dain and then shakes his head, “Not really. No,” a small smirk, “Sorry.”

Dain and Dwalin exchange a glance. Frerin doesn't notice. It's been a long day. It's been a long, teeth-clenching, hand-trembling, guilt-filled day, a day where he's ricocheted between a million emotions and the emptiness he feeds up his nose when the noise in his head gets too white to be bearable. He wants to go to sleep. He wants to nod off, slip off, dissolve. He wants to rest, as quiet as can be. He wants to _rest_. All of a sudden the exhaustion has hit him like iron.

“Frerin?”

Dwalin's voice causes him to move his neck a fraction of an inch-- out of obligation, more than anything. The bare minimum he can bring himself to do.

“You all right there?”

“Tired,” he comments, and sniffles, in the same tone he'd said _scared_ earlier. He's both. Both, most definitely both. Dis' absence claws at his throat from the bottom towards the top, sinking its nails into the root of his tongue-- he knows the pressure of tears when he feels them, and he has to pull back, pull in, put down the mug, bring his knees to his chest and his head between them, and rock, back and forth, very small.

The shivers always begin in his stomach.

“Hey. Frerin.” Dwalin stands and Frerin wishes he hadn't, _fuck_ , how could he ever let it come to this, how could he ruin it burn it choke it _destroy it_? And the anger he feels is enough to tear him to shreds, first his ribcage then his heart. He closes his eyes tighter. He tries to breathe, and his skin only responds with burning.

Dain catches a glimpse of the tracks on Frerin's arms in the light of the lamp.

“All right, c'mon, hand me the crutches,” he asks Dwalin, as he stands too, “ _thank you_. Now, Frerin--”

No answer.

Then again, quieter, taking the brusqueness from his voice, “Frerin?”

Frerin untangles himself from the mess of his own body enough to show a stark blue eye. It flutters past Dain's face, lingers over his shoulders, and picks someplace above his right elbow. Dain squeezes his handgrip and takes a few steps forward.

“There's something I'd like to show you.”

Another pause. Dwalin stands back, scratches his cheek. Frerin sees him and wishes he could apologize for the scene he's making, but the voice in his mouth's decided it's time to hide. A blessing, really, the refuge of his own body opposed to the rest of the world, when the noise becomes all-encompassing, but sometimes it can become so Goddamn _inconveniencing_. He takes a breath and curls out from inside himself, slips off the windowsill and stands.

It saps the energy right out of him, whatever energy was left to begin with. He nods.

Dain scoffs, “Come on now, there's two friends I'd like you to meet.”

Frerin follows him, hesitating, as he opens the door. Dwalin follows close behind. Dain scowls at the darkening horizon, “Before they get too skittish.”

It's two of them: one black with white calves, one bay. Shire horses. They turn their heads when they recognize Dain, one in each stall, and the bay one whinnies. Frerin stops at the entrance of the barn. Dwalin sees him exhale like he's been keeping his breath ever since he left London. He exhales like he's just found the secret to happiness. He exhales like he's a person again, for a fraction of a second. The thought of needing to get high rests at the back of his mind, lingers like a petulant nagging child-- but for a moment there's something slightly louder. For a moment. For the time it takes for him to inhale and smell. He takes a few tentative steps forwards, towards Dain who's currently feeding them carrots and cooing. Dain nods at him, “This one's Spitfire,” and he points to the bay (behind him, Dwalin rolls his eyes and hides his smile behind his hand), “and this one's Sterling.”

Frerin tentatively extends a hand towards Spitfire. She nickers, smells his fingers, leans forward. Frerin glances to Dain, asks for permission (it will occur to him in a few moments that he isn't being forced to talk), and Dain nudges at him to go on.

He presses a hand to Spitfire's snout, her eyes fixed on him, his body an inch from unraveling all of its stitches. But she doesn't fret. She doesn't move. She doesn't feel skittish or nervous or uncomfortable.

Something sacred always breaks, when a rebirth is necessary. Holiness has its ways of finding the missing shards once it has shattered, and build itself up from the ground to the tops of the trees, piece by piece, bit by bit. Sacrality itself, however, knows how this is done-- there is no way to teach a beating heart how to find its own blood in the mud. It must be done with quietness and patience and love, and the humility to know when one must keep quiet and watch the healing from afar. Holiness has little to do with it, then, as much as learning how to let go and learning how to fill the cracks in the hands with new things, brighter, bigger, softer in the end. Spitfire simply waits for his hands to find her, and while Frerin can't bring himself to speak right now, he hums, a single held note, and he smiles.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the long wait, everyone! the reason, for once, _isn't_ that i've been completely swamped by real life-- it's that i'm signed up for this year's hobbit big bang, and am currently working on that. if you've ever wondered what nori, dwalin and bofur got up to way back in 1999, then check back here may 14th for the first few chapters which will eventually feature wonderful wonderful art by the delightful bracari-iris on tumblr!


	25. viii

Thorin gets the idea, and, obviously, doesn't tell anyone.

It's not something he does anymore, tell people things: his life seems too empty, too boring to prove a tale to tell, and the only one he supposes would listen he doesn't know how to feel about, which is, all in all, the most terrifying thing that has happened to him recently, barred a sister with an eating disorder and a junkie brother, of course, but something tells him those two are all part of the _package_ : when your life falls apart, or feels like it is, it falls apart all at once. It'd be ridiculous, for it to wait for you to catch up: it's much easier if it just lets go, like a body going slack once it's dead. It's your job to pick it back up and try and glue everything back together, after all, learn how to be your heart's own undertaker.

The problem is, he doesn't know if he wants to be one anymore.

He finds he's grown tired of dirt beneath his nails and of the quietness of a cemetery where there's only tattered remains, over and over and over, as far as the eye can see: mother, Frerin, Dis, himself, his father's nails in his face, the chill that'd settled over all of them once Valerie had gone. That one, that particular kind of ever-present cold, had begun after they'd come home once she'd been buried. Thrain had held them, quietly, standing in the middle of the living room, the last time Thorin thinks his father had ever done anything so _intimate_ , and then he'd crawled up to his study upstairs, leaving his children to learn how to breathe underwater, and Thorin remembers this only because it had been a pain so crystal clear and _unimaginable_ , so sharp and all-encompassing, it etched runes on the bottom of his bones, it left dirt between his skin and muscle, an itch that ten years later's droned down to a dull throb, because he was never given the tools to know how to relieve it through and through, because grief is not something you can learn on your own.

And last, of course, is Dwalin, the most recent of the caskets, the hardest one to understand, the one he wishes he could bury the quickest and the least painfully-- the one he wants to reanimate the most, despite it all. But with emptiness comes doubt, and with doubt comes apathy, and with apathy comes the knowledge, sickly thin, sickly bitter, that maybe Dwalin never really cared in the first place, and with it comes, tumbling down into chaos, the quiet constant analysis of every word they'd ever shared and every gesture and the conclusion, to him most utterly logically undeniable, that things are over, there's no point, Dwalin probably despises him, no matter he drove his brother down to Scotland, no matter that when he was mending the cut on Thorin's forehead he used such reverence, such delicacy, such tender quiet touches that Thorin's either forgotten or told himself they didn't really matter at all- why love something like him? Why find it worthy in any way at all that isn't spitting on its corpse?

(But it's a tiring thing to do, to always have to argue with yourself).

And then, behind the corner, Ireland, six months of that, all the other deployments that followed and will follow, the boy shot a foot from him, the trap of an olive-green uniform welded to his back, his father's pride, Dwalin's disappointment, him, caught in the middle, the wind of the chaos his mind is a wind so cold it chills his bones even when he is warming his hands with the promise of home, because there will always be skeletons to nurture, there will always be ghosts in the closet. Still, here he is, _alive_ , stained in blood up to his elbows, wading through mud, standing in the middle of a house that still smells of new. He can count all the damage he's found written on the backs of memories and feel like his heart is sinking and he is sinking with it, or he can try and carve a shell for himself out of the damage-- all in all, he's buried his heart much too often now, at the age of twenty-one, to want to have anything to do with spades ever again. Which is why, in a way, he's here: standing in an empty living room, no furniture, no proof of life, just the artificial smell of cleanliness and the whiteness of daytime pouring in through the large windowpanes that give out to the garden, any memory of its previous occupants wiped away, anesthetized, removed, rewashed, rinse and repeat for a new life, a new way of being, a house that lived and then was quiet, all its previous memories under lock and key. Layers upon layers of existence, he thinks, wondering if its wood would be able to handle the weight of his own two shoulders, figuring it might, figuring that is what houses must _do_ : they must live, and handle, and experience, and become either sanctuary or Hell, and then go back to quiet as soon as the people living in them do not need them anymore if not to sell them. Wood, born again, that creaks beneath his feet. He takes a step forward, and it sighs, the sound a bump inside his heart.

One last ditch attempt to shed his skin, this skin, the skin he's always worn: he has found it's been poisoning his blood, he has found it too tight to believe it helps him live, and he's decided to tell his father of his plans only after he's made his full decision. There weren't many words between them to begin with, but now there's even _less_. Now there's two holes in the space where they place the things they tell each other, one living and one dead: Valerie whose laughter he is scared he can no longer remember, and Frerin whose laughter is no longer for them.

(Holes, not ghosts, because if you call them ghosts you give them an agency they cannot have, or else they'll find every dark little way to break you. If you call them holes, if you call them _emptiness_ , they only learn how to kill you from the inside out).

Let Thrain wait, for a moment, before Thorin lets him know he's decided to deepen the depths between them a little more.

Thorin rubs his hands together and stares at the white wall in front of him, the empty space atop a fireplace. The floors are wood, the smell of new and of wax thinly spread making him feel like the world is spinning in its hinges.

“The kitchen's down here, sir, if you want to see it...”

He looks up and stares at the realtor (small man, mousy features, glasses too thick for his face) and blinks. When he smiles, he is tired.

“I'd love to see it, thank you.”

 

* * *

 

There is a living room, and it is big enough, he thinks, to host bookshelves up to the ceiling. The thought, independent in the way it flickers at the top of his head and doesn't seem to leave, scares him: the unknown lies stretched before him in walls he is thinking of decorating, in bills he'll have to pay, in a house to take care of, glass screen doors behind which a garden lies. White plastic chairs, he thinks, and flowerpots. Roses. He could make it work, in the summer when the air doesn't hurt.

The bedroom is large enough for a king sized bed.

There's room enough for two, in all its thousand shades of heartache.

 

* * *

 

This one also has a garage: large enough to fit a car, he thinks. And a motorcycle, for Dwalin. And one of his, too, maybe.

_There you go again, on a tangent that breaks your heart._

The light falls in through the windows over the garage door: bright and brisk, this winter seems to be, December as cold as bones, December as quiet as cemeteries. The dust against the ice, the ghosts suspended in reanimation. Light, pallid, like a waterfall frozen in space. His heart sighs in its chains when he sees it, and thinks of hot chocolate and a blanket on the sofa and the quiet crackle of his new fireplace. _Comfort_. He turns on himself a few times, concrete scraping beneath the soles of his shoes, watching the light playing along the wall, a game of shine and shadows stained with the passage of clouds over the sun, what little light there is coming and going in its pale waves, light reflected on dirt, mirroring back the scent of the world. He curls his nose at the scent he cannot place, the feeling of opening, the house welcoming a new heart and soul, rich in the smell of fresh paint, like a warm new welcome, like smiles.

“Do you figure I could fit a car and two motorcycles in here?” he asks. He barely notices the shade of unease that's spread over his cheeks.

The realtor stops to think, “Probably, yes. Would depend on the car size, I assume.”

“Something smaller than a Roadster.”

“Definitely, then.”

Thorin feels his own face light up in a smile that's _not_ bitter, unable to control it, suddenly glad at the excited pitter-patter in his chest. He nods, showing his teeth in what he assumes the sudden movement beneath his breastbone is passing off as a smile, and says: “Then I'll take it.”

 

* * *

 

“Mind passing the salt, Robert?”

Robert, sitting where Frerin used to sit, nods and makes to hand the shaker to Thrain, but his arms only manage to reach across the table at the height of Thorin's left shoulder. Thorin snatches the salt and hands it along the rest of the way, placing it in front of his father's plate.

“Thank you, boys.”

Dis cuts her green-beans in half, and then in thirds.

“If you cut them anymore, you'll mash 'em,” Thorin comments, and Dis glares daggers at him. He grins and goes back to his mashed potatoes, as Robert smiles with him.

“Eating takes time and concentration. Besides, shouldn't you be in Bulford?”

Thorin shrugs, “Had stuff I had to check out here and I had a few leftover days from leave so, why not?”

“Will this mean you won't be able to come for Christmas?” Dis says.

“No,” Thorin says patiently, “Christmas' a holiday.”

“What kind of stuff did you have to take care of, Thorin?” Robert asks, “If you don't mind me asking.”

Thorin debates whether to be vague. He stares at Robert for a second, and clears his throat, “I've been thinking about moving out.”

Dis' hands still, hover over her plate holding a knife and a fork each, a minuscule piece of green-bean speared on the fork she suddenly thinks won't be reaching her mouth anytime soon: her stomach recoils and locks itself shut, as if closing itself is the trick, as if not allowing any food at all inside will be the way to keep herself okay. She looks at her brother, the table quiet with the wait for a reaction, no matter the direction it might take, whether have it sink or burn, whether she is to accept it, or refuse it.

She turns towards Thrain, “Did you know about this?”

Accusatory, maybe, in her perceived abandonment, in the sudden sensation the rug's been torn out from beneath her feet. She chastises herself in between the seconds that pass between her question and her father's answer: it is not her place to be angry at Throin for wanting to move out. It is not her right nor is it her duty and she is being _childish_ , for fuck's sake she is being _childish_ \-- but Frerin left, and now Thorin is talking about leaving too all of a sudden, and she's feeling abandoned all over again and trapped in being too young to go anywhere still, for a little under a year, and her body pricks around this pain and screams at it, rejects it like the wrong kidney implanted in a body that cannot accept it, and maybe if she shrunk away and died, burned away by the internal homicide of an external organ, the irony of a body refusing the very thing that's supposed to save it, she'd much prefer it to a closed up stomach and a rage she can't even properly place. Thorin's hardly at home anyway, it's Frerin's absence that hurts her the most. Why. _Why_.

Thrain nods, wipes his mouth with his neatly folded napkin, and sets it down next to his plate, “Yes. Thorin told me earlier this week.”

“ _Earlier this week_?”

“Dee.” Thorin mutters, but Robert glares at him. Thorin eyes him, brow furrowed, and then looks back at his sister who's staring at him with her jaw all clenched, and her frame all a moment before shaking, “And when were you thinking of telling _me_?” she asks, her voice the mirror image of her tenseness.

“As soon as I thought it'd be good.”

“Excellent timing, then,” Dis comments flatly. Thorin sighs and goes back to eating, but his sister continues, “God forbid I ever be told _first_ about anything.”

Thorin puts down his fork, “Who I tell and when is my personal decision.”

“Have you already bought a house?”

“I'm... working on it.”

“That was _fast_. Where is it?”

“Notting Hill.”

“Of course. Nice neighborhood. Alice Gregor's mother lives there.”

“Good for her,” Thorin snaps back, “it's got great views.”

Dis takes a sip of her water. She doesn't know where her anger is taking her. She doesn't know what it's doing nor what she wants to conclude with it-- it just happened, and now she's dealing with the aftermath of it and the three pairs of eyes pinned to her wrists. She lowers them, stops wringing her hands, and then goes back to her food.

“Well, that's that, I guess.”

“I really don't see where the problem is.”

“I don't-- I don't want to argue,” Dis says, her voice still strained, “Not at the dinner table.”

“All right. I had no intention of arguing anyway.”

“Glad you could both go about this like adults,” Thrain intervenes. Robert covers his mouth with his hand, brow furrowed, and tries very hard to understand whether the man's being sarcastic or not. His girlfriend's father is, all in all, terrifying.

It must be something in the gaze.

Thrain, sitting across from him at the other end of the table, stares directly into Princesson's face, and then to his children, who are both staring into space.

“Dis, there was no need to get angry, Thorin, there was no need to snap back. He's made his decision, and he's moving out. That's all there's to say about this.”

Dis shifts in her seat and says nothing. It's Thorin who apologizes, head low, eyes downcast, and Dis knows that if Frerin were here he'd be scoffing.

 

* * *

 

There's a quiet rap on her door.

Dis looks up from the book she's reading and sees her brother's silhouette, the hallway light like a halo around him, light surrounding the darkness of his shape. She glances at the clock, and surprise flicks her breath when she reads it's 3 AM.

“Mind if I come in?” Thorin whispers, all habit and composure and asking for permission. Whatever anger she'd felt, for a bitter resentful moment, is gone, was gone, almost instantly, after dinner. It lies like a puddle in her hands, drenches the pages of her book, and she does not know what to do with them, stained as they are, fingers and paper and ink that bled behind her eyes into a single being, a creature of creation, its cries muffled by small regret. So she smiles, as bitter and anxious as she can, and isn't entirely sure Thorin can see it in the semidarkness.

She turns her night light off and stands instead of answering, walks up to him. Her brother melts out of the shadows, his buzzcut, his wide shoulders, the slight dip of his head so he can look her in the eye. Her hair's still short, a reminder of an afternoon that like all his other fevered dreams he keeps hidden tight in the back of his pocket, to run a thumb along when he can't sleep, to weigh against the empty in his chest, to begin to understand how they carved such large holes in his wrists, how they broke his bones and reset them into what they are today.

“Let's talk outside.”

“All right,” Thorin nods, and moves all of his awkward bones to let her pass, “outside outside or inside outside?”

“Outside outside.”

She feels his gaze drill along the length of her arms and the width of her shoulders, and knows he's pulling up charts in his head, weights and body mass and caloric intakes, and before he can finish (or even really begin), “Are you sure you won't freeze to dea--” she's quick and sharp, and says, “I'm fine. Lend me your leather jacket.”

“What's wrong with speaking inside? It's snowing.”

How to properly explain the way the house's come to sediment itself onto her bones? How to properly explain that now, with Frerin gone, some days she's so lonely she hardly even leaves the university library ot head home for dinner? How to explain it, in simple words, to a boy who saw his chance to run and _took_ it in the arms of a Scottish boy, in the arms of a rifle, in the arms of a new, cavernous home to make his at the tender ancient age of twenty-one? His seventeen year old sister, however, floats inside her own self, behind tall glass windows and mahogany panels and a mother whose absence she is more aware of now than she ever was growing up, because Valerie gone is a question she's been trying to tell herself not to answer, and it's _Would things have been different with Father, if you had still been alive_? Would Frerin still be here, would he still be part of them, whatever family nucleus they've managed to scrap together?

But, most importantly-- would she had been _happy_? Had her mother lived, Dis Oakenshield may not have had to resign herself to the idea that happiness for her is bound to forever being a struggle made of sluggish evenings and days empty, stretching over bones like paper-thin skin, having to bear down and learn over and over, unmake her mistakes, treat herself with a kindness she can hardly recognize as belonging to her own two hands, to learn that kisses do not always hide poison, to learn that she has a heart worth being carried when all she wants to do is make herself so small, so small, so small. Happiness _has_ been easier, Robert's hands quiet tools of comfort and calm, and her body is not something she wants to fight against anymore. But in moments like these, with her brother's shoulders always slightly bent forward and his expression always slightly apologetic, with her brother not sharing his plans with her, with his brother quietly leaving, she wishes, simply put, that her entire life had been completely different.

No, the house and its darkness are not an ideal place to be, with her chest such a tight little coil.

So Thorin gives her his jacket, she takes it, and they sit on the steps of the kitchen backdoor, the gate Dwalin had used to climb over so many times directly across from them. Dis wears the jacket over her shoulders, buries her hands between her thighs, wears Thorin's makeshift armor that smells of aftershave and cigarettes like the physical manifestation of the bond they share, more solid than anything they've ever had, all in all, a jacket heavier than the times her brother, stunted in the numbness their family seems to foster, had managed to reach across the gap and hold her hand.

This will have to do, however. She's learned that being let down is useless, and only fosters resentment.

“What did you want to talk about?”

Outside, despite the chill in her bones. But outside they can both breathe, deep gulping breaths that don't smell of the past, without the weight of family on every single painful inhale.

“I'm sorry I upset you at dinner.”

And from her lips, automatically, “It's fine,” before she can stop herself and stop it. The “it doesn't matter,” luckily, she manages to catch before she speaks it: it _does_ matter, she keeps on telling herself. It matters. _Her needs fucking matter_.

But Thorin shakes his head, a gesture so familiar and adult at the same time Dis feels her heart sink into her ribs, like it's trying to find his past the snowflakes.

“No, I should've talked to you about it, softened the whole process. I shouldn't have just... dropped it onto you and left you dealing with the aftermath. I'm sorry.”

Dis looks at him not make eye contact. Her brother sighs small, Thorin's shoulders racked with the depth of it, his breath white puffs of vapor, the same escaping from her nose in small bursts.

She shivers despite the jacket, the dull throb of the chill in her knees spreading up along her spine.

“Let's go back inside,” Thorin says when he sees this.

“I'm fine out here.”

“Inside. Where it's warm. I'll make you tea.”

Thorin stands, he's already made his decision, he's already opened the door. Dis frowns at him, and the sudden, almost out of place smile on his reddened cheeks only makes her frown deepen.

“Don't make me carry you,” Thorin says with a chuckle.

“Jesus. _Fine_.”

Dis sighs and stands up, knees popping, and follows Thorin back inside, her body once more uncomfortably heavy in the pressure of the walls, her fingers tingling where they'd gone numb from the cold and she hadn't noticed. She puts Thorin's jacket on the back of a chair, and sits down at her usual chair, near the door to the living room.

“I didn't think it'd happen so quickly after Frer had gone, that's all. But maybe it happened quickly exactly _because_ of it.”

She narrows her eyes and tilts her head to the side, watching her brother's back as he fills a teapot and doesn't answer, the sleeves of his sweater rolled up to his elbows. When chains break, we try to build them back with what we find, quickly, before the weight fractures the rest and we tumble down the cliff, let it be rope or cloth or heartstrings. Dis recognizes she was hoping to fill Frerin's space with the height of Thorin's frame. With him moving out, that's even less plausible than before-- the thought of Thorin being some kind of rebound fills her with a bubble of discomfort, but he's not a rebound, he's something different than Frerin that she needs just as much-- Dis needs stone as much as she needs the waves singing in her bones. What is the point of learning how to swim, if there's no land to swim back to?

“I'm sorry I got angry.”

Thorin turns around, holding two empty mugs, looking puzzled.

“No, it's fine. I was inconsiderate.”

“And I was irrational.”

In the semi-darkness she sees her brother smirk, “Then let's agree we were both in the wrong, and call it a day.”

“I didn't know how to react.” A pause. Thorin waits. “...Frerin leaving fucked me up.”

Thorin sighs as the kettle starts to boil. He grabs a dishtowel to lift it up and put it onto the table, using the towel as a coaster.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

There is more silence, as equally maddening. Dis stares at it, thick, fester between the two.

“Did you know I wasn't asleep?” she asks, just to chase it away. There is enough quiet as it is, in this house, she doesn't need anymore to drive her even madder.

He shrugs and avoids looking her in the face, “No. I just assumed. I always forget how quiet the house is. It's gotten quieter, too.”

“What would you have done if I hadn't been?”

Thorin sets down the two mugs and a strainer and sits down across from her, the light from the small lamp above their head (as opposed to the large one hanging from the ceiling) a rhythmic flicker, a twentieth century halo. He sits down, inhales, exhales, his hands clasped before him, his body following the mugs to the wood like rain falling. He grabs his own, brings it close to himself, and stirs it absent-mindedly. Then he's smiling again, “Probably just gone to the library to sulk.”

She smiles too, and remembers how she used to think, with the bright hopefulness of being eight years old, that her older brothers held all the answers and comfort a dead mother could no longer provide. Her heart closes momentarily with the violence of grief, and the smile falls slightly. She wants the conversation to do _more_ , be _more_ , become something apart from their stupid little excuse of small-talk-- small-talk tinted with darkness, small-talk about an addict brother and running from a house that's been much too heavy for too long. Thorin stares at the tea leaves that get caught in the strainer, the liquid darkened dripping into the white ceramic mug, and then he seems to remember something--

“Milk! Do you want milk in your tea?”

He stands up, the chair creaks, and he dives for the fridge. Dis watches him rummage through it, and then murmurs, quiet, “Thorin.”

He stops halfway, holding a jar of jam, “I'm not going to drink the tea, Thorin. I don't care about the tea. I care about talking with you.”

Thorin always looks like he's been struck, whenever anyone seems to express interest in him: it's a quaint little gaze, the one that blossoms in his eyes, this mild surprise mixed with what might just be discomfort. He puts the jam back in place. He absent-mindedly grabs the milk. He closes the fridge door. He folds himself back into place: shoulders drawn, hands to his sides, back straight. He manages to keep his stance for a full two seconds, before noticing what he's doing. Then that melts away too, and Thorin Oakenshield once again substitutes Lieutenant Thorin Charles Oakenshield of The Vikings, First Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment, with an awkward twenty-something standing in the kitchen staring at his sister with an expression that borders on comical bewilderment. He's still holding the bottle of milk he plucked from the fridge door.

“You're turning eighteen in four months.” he sheepishly says.

“I am.”

“That went by... fast.”

“Yeah, well. Kids tend to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Grow up.”

Two words that carry just a bit too much weight for him not to feel uncomfortable. There's no accusation in her tone save for the one he's hearing, regardless of her actual intent: you should have been there, you should have watched me grow, _you should have been a brother_.

But duty is duty, cry England and Saint George.

Thorin puts the milk down on the table because he doesn't know how to move anymore.

“True.”

Here she's sitting, here he's standing, here they try and gather the pieces of the last few months and make sense of them.

“I still don't want you to go,” she mutters.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“It's not up to me. I didn't want you to go join the army, either. I didn't want Frerin to become a junkie. Didn't even want Mum to die, for that matter. God forbid I didn't want that asshole to almost do whatever he wanted to do,” her brother flinches and she stops. She stops before she says, “I didn't want you to kill him, either,” and the notion of _a life for a life_ rests in her lap like the book she was reading and she doesn't want to move her hands so it doesn't stain them. But it wasn't her life, it was the perceived ownership the men in her life thought they had on her. She stares blankly into space when that particular thought bubbles into her brain, and then decides to sweep it under the rug. She wonders where that leaves her, now that that thought's finally formed.

She thinks it leaves her with knowing no one except her has any right to decide what to do with her body. Yes.

That should work, for now. She'll elaborate on it as soon as the night and her slight tiredness don't make most of her thoughts a simple jumble.

She stops before she says, “I didn't want to stop eating, either,” she bites her tongue, she keeps it quiet. Her pain is hers, for now. Her pain is much too big to speak of with anyone who isn't Frerin.

“I'm saying... What I'm trying to say is-- you don't choose your family. You don't ever get to really choose what your family does to you, or how you'll react to it. It just happens. Family's family. You have to live with it.”

Family, oh-- _family_. What a heavy little thing to carry around someone's neck. What a perfectly chaotic thing, skins you know you'll never shed. Accept the horror of it. Learn to live with it, as much as their weight makes you limp.

Thorin does care for the tea, and he does take a sip. He realizes too late he's forgotten the sugar, but the moment can't be broken. He thought, in all honesty, that it'd happen louder: finding Dis is something he thought would happen in fanfare, in celebration, the long-sought objective of a lifetime of growing up together so deeply apart, in the same house and oceans away. It is nothing of the sort-- no.

It's the way, he figures, beginning to come home should feel like: like the moment where you finally fall asleep. Like the moment where the sunlight finally peeks from beyond the clouds.

Thorin inhales, then, hands holding onto the mug like the only weight he'll allow himself as a lifeline, shoulders slightly hunched. Dis watches him and waits for him to speak: when the silence protracts, extends beyond their heads up towards the ceiling and then the stars, she readies herself to fill it instead of her brother: mouth open, words blossoming at the root of her tongue, brain already working, ready to make it less awkward, ready to salvage the salvageable.

Then he speaks.

“I'm sorry I wasn't here. Ever. I'm sorry.”

That is enough to cease-- cease what? Cease fire, cease breathing, cease the words she was about to speak, cease, _cease_. Simply cease, simply take, simply make her stare. She doesn't know what to say, and that is the truth. She doesn't know, doesn't understand, cannot imagine understanding what her brother's just done-- not at first, of course. Because at first it is almost almost like her brother is apologizing, of all things, her brother is saying sorry for years and years of... of what, precisely? Of running? Of escaping? Of seeking refuge between Dwalin's sheets? Of wanting to _survive_?

At first it sounds exactly like that, or at least leaves the impression of that. Then she realizes that is _exactly_ what her brother is doing, and that there are two ways to go about this-- she could let the resentment seep into her bones, see it as Thorin begging her to take him in again, begging her to lick his wounds and keep quiet and accept his apology even if she is hurting, or she could see it another way entirely, and simply take her brother's hand and take the warmth of what he is trying to mend and accept it, the ring he has just wielded back into shape, still hot from the embers, a metalworker that tries to trade in smiles and warmth as opposed to precious jewels. There's little comfort in coldness: they may all have blue eyes, but there is fire inside the very depths of their cores, like the stone, like the rock, like the earth beneath their feet. Solid and true. And if they do not stand together, they will crumble quicker than anything: all of the strength of the Oakenshield family lies in the mountains they'd move to each other.

Sometimes it's difficult to see, but then Thorin apologizes in the quiet kitchen in the depths of 4 AM, and the mountain is as present as ever, like the mother they've lost around whose absence they've had to build their home.

She reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. Thorin looks almost startled. She doesn't move.

“It's all right. It isn't your responsibility.”

“It should have been.”

But in the comfort of their presence Dis does not allow Thorin to linger on the edge of the precipice he's wanting to throw himself in, this bottomless pit of guilt barely alleviated by a half-mumbled apology. His sister takes this mumble for what it is, an apology through and through, and decides to acknowledge and accept it-- some people need foundations built, first and foremost, from the solid stone of forgiveness.

“We weren't your responsibility.”

The name of whose responsibility it _should_ have been, unsaid, lies between them, as it always has, as it does so often, as it should, and Thorin sweeps it aside with a sad brittle smile. Dis smiles back to him, and sees the brittleness flake away ever slightly, aware of her equally bitter upwards curve.

“I love you,” she says, to her brother as much as to herself. She remembers an afternoon not too long ago where all three of them held each other, sitting on the MacFundins' floor. It was something unheard of at the time: in this kitchen all of a sudden it feels like something they can build up from, like the ground. Much more like _hope_ , much less like a fortuitous isolated incident. It is not the end of their journey, this apology confessed with snow outside. But it is, as it should be, a beginning: and all things must start somewhere. All wounds must be cauterized, before they can heal.

Thorin runs his thumb along the back of his sister's hand.

“I love you too, Dee.”

 


	26. ix

**NOVEMBER 28 th  
1987**

“Mind helping me with these?”

The way Dain places the pot on the table seems to leave little question regarding what he wants the answer to be. Frerin stares at the pot full of jam from over his smattering of a breakfast, the egg he scrambled for himself and a slice of toasted bread-- his stomach whines one way or the other, and he's still trying to determine whether it's weeping in hunger or coming dangerously close to making him retch.

Not that easy a thing to determine, especially now that he's just started coming back to the world of the living. _Of the living_ , a term he's coined for himself that he finds oddly fitting. Most days he still longs for the stupidly protective film heroin used to give him, the emptiness he could appeal to when things just got _too much_ , but he's better at keeping that part of him down, now, he thinks. He hopes. He's not entirely sure why he should care about silencing it at all when it _helps_ , but at least he's learned to wrangle it and wait for better days, perhaps, days in which he'll feel strong and steady enough to stand on his own two feet. Those will be strange days, he figures, days where he'll allow the world to be colourful again, because it's not like his hands don't still shake. It's not like he still cannot recognize himself in the mirror, but eyes that he was used to staring back at him all wretched shades of emptiness are now a good colour clearer-- there's blue back in the murkiness. Before he couldn't recognize himself every time his mind would claw its way away from the awareness of his own face, the living proof of him being a creature of flesh-- now it's changed, the way it reads itself has changed, it doesn't exactly understand who or what is staring back, and it still doesn't know whether it likes it, whether it wants to keep it, staring curiously at Frerin's own eyes reflected by the polished glass, interested, like all animals are when they encounter something new, but also conscious that this thing that looks at and sees itself is something that is here to stay. To learn to coexist with his own body, a ghost learning how to live with the house it's been destined to haunt.

Sobriety is an ill-fitting suit he'd found on a fluke after digging through the closet, a suit he's now trying to put back onto shoulders shaped a bit too differently, and so he's bending down every which way, fixing a sleeve one moment, a pant's leg hem the next, he knows in the end he'll reemerge wearing a suit shaped in an entirely new way, one, however, that he figures should be tailored precisely to the measure of his old, newfound body, changed and different, bones with new weight, eyes with new ghosts, smiles that know exactly how your vomit tastes on the third day you're detoxing, able to see the sunlight for what it really is, and that is the miracle of existence.

All in all, what a puzzling thing, to decide to want to rejoin the world of the living. He's still warming up to the idea, deciding if it's a viable option for him.

He also thinks he should probably move to reach Dain standing at the other end of the kitchen table, which is a thing he hasn't really started doing yet. Frerin wipes his mouth with his napkin not entirely unlike the way his father usually does, and then he stands with the chair creaking in every one of his joints. He watches as Dain thoroughly stirs the jam he's made out of the blueberries he'd harvested and frozen, and then Langròmach stops stirring and frowns at him. Frerin blinks back and avoids his gaze. Dain doesn't stop frowning.

“Aren't you gonna ask me what you have t'do, lad?”

Frerin awkwardly buries his hands in his pockets, “Shit. Yeah,” he looks like he's trying to remember how to grin before he does, and then asks, “What do I have to do?”

Dain's frown, already a rickety fragile construction ready to crumble, is blown down by the gust of wind of his smile. He winks at the boy in front of him, “You're fine, kid. I was joking. Just grab the jars I've been cleaning.”

Frerin blinks towards the pot on the stove, then back at Dain. He grabs his plate and cutlery and places them in the sink, turns the tap on, rinses them off, carries the last piece of toast around between his teeth, and then turns his attention to the jars.

“Pliers are next to the sink,” Dain says, nudging at them with his chin, “an' you can use the basket that's on th'floor there.”

Frerin moves the blanket out of the way, “There's tools in here.” he says, muffled by the toast he doesn't really know what to do with, looking back at Dain. Dain shrugs, “Well then. Move them out?”

Frerin sniffles for a second, thinks about how to move, and then Dain sees the boy's entire body bend itself downwards towards the ground, knees perfectly bent, arms braced on each side of his body. He meticulously pulls out three screwdrivers, a drill and a box of nails and then stands back up, loses his balance slightly since both of his hands are full, and then stabilizes himself by taking a small step backwards. He looks back up at Dain, and waits. Dain pauses from the stirring and nudges towards the windowsill near the counter, “That one'll do for now, lad. And thanks for all th'help.”

It's not added as an afterthought. Full part of the sentence. He's been appreciated.

“No worries,” Frerin mumbles, putting the tools onto the windowsill Dain pointed at and then picking up the basket with the same concentrated and organized movements he used to empty it, as if he were trying very hard not to drop anything or go overboard or exist as a physical entity within the larger fabric of space and time. He sets it up next to the stove, swallows down the last of his toast and then finally grabs the pliers. He brings the first three jars over, then the following four, then the last three.

“Is this all?”

“We're startin' with the blueberries, yes.”

“There's more?”

“There's half of this summer's harvest.”

Frerin raises both eyebrows at the jars, and then wipes his hands on his pants.

“Anything else I can do?”

Dain nods and then points at the ceramic vase where the kitchen utensils are kept, “Grab another ladle, and get spooning,” he says, with a grin. Frerin nods, and quickly picks another ladle, large and ancient-looking. He glances up at Dain's chin as he fills his first jar, and Dain glances at Frerin's work in return,

“Good. Just like that. You're doing great.”

Frerin looks back at the now full jar and smiles small, his scraggly curls covering his forehead, brushing against his eyes.

The smell, in the meantime, spreads through the kitchen. It creeps up along the wooden stairs that lead to the second floor, it seeps into the floorboards, up Frerin's nostrils, nestles in his brain. It's such a different smell from the smell that he's used to, from the heavy musky smell Oakenshield Manor holds, a smell that is of dark rooms and old books, not so different, after all, from the smell of watered-down blood and heroin cooking, the smell he's picked to lace his clothes with. This smell, the smell of fresh jam, expands instead of bearing down, stretches the way a back that's been sitting for much too long decides to stretch, with a groan of relief, with a sigh of comfort. It has chosen this spot, this moment in his day, to come and greet him and it widens its embrace to envelop his heart, slow, sluggish, sweet and sticky warm. He doesn't want to call this, precisely, an exorcism. To exorcise something implies wanting to eradicate its darkness from the center of your chest, but he doesn't think he's made for _letting go_ : his sister perhaps finds comfort in rushing water, in the cleansing properties of the sea, in finding burdens and letting them slip downstream from her weary bloodied hands, in whatever the current has to whisper to her ears, running its fingers through her jaw-length hair like a lover, but he still has a fragment of anger left, a white-hot kernel he's nursing, a flame his life depends on. His bones are still too cold to keep themselves alive on their own: to exist the way he exists is to burn, he thinks, to return to the living is to substitute water with a fire that he himself has chosen to stoke, blue flames rushing to help his heart in its beating. Without his anger he knows he would be nothing, and nothing is something he doesn't want to be anymore.

He fills a third jar.

“Why did you leave?”

“Excuse me?” Dain asks.

“Why did you leave the family? Move up here, you know--”

“Middle of nowhere?”

“Well that's. One way of putting it.”

“Wouldn't you, with the family we've got?”

Frerin laughs, half-sighs, wipes the side of his jar with a cloth, “You make a fair point.”

The ladles clink against the glass as they continue their duty. Dain glances up at the boy, his dead cousin's son, and says, “Well, the only good one out of all of us was yer mother, after all.”

Frerin's ladle meets the table with a soft sound, a small sound, the sound his gaze makes when it meets the tip of his knuckles as he presses both fists to the wood on each side of the jar, made of glass, half full with thick dark blue jam. Dain realizes he's spoken words of power, a power, in hindsight, he should have expected for them to hold. Blood always rings truer when it was taken from you, and he of all people knows it best, whether it is your own pounds of flesh or the ones that used to make the structure of your heart. He waits on the sidelines for Frerin, whatever he decides to do or say, whether he wants to acknowledge this invocation of his mother, or wether the holiness of memory is to be found in some .

“I can barely remember her.”

Frerin says it with his head titled to the side, learning and experiencing the taste this new brand of words has, these new admissions of fragile, these experiments in vulnerability. He opens his ribcage and the person chosen to search for his heart in the muck is someone who isn't his sister: an entire new brand of openness. An entire new way of living bravery.

Dain stops canning the jam, and furrows his brow in kindness and curiosity, “Would you like me t'tell you more about her?”

Frerin shrugs, “How well did you know her?”

The sweet smell hovers in the cold light, evens itself out and becomes, quietly, translucent and solid like stained glass, a surface to see your shadow move against, a surface where they'll see your silhouette against the flames.

“Valerie? She was... ah. Fifteen years older than me-- y'know. That cousin you just _want_ to impress. She was smart, and when I say _smart_ \--”

“Lawyer, right?”

“Oh yes. She had to fight like _Hell_ to let her father allow her t'study for it. But she was one of the few people capable of taking Annatar Enterprises and their bloodsuckers head-on. Bloody brilliant.”

The strangeness of this conversation hits Frerin all at once. Here is someone who knew the person with whom he shares half a genetic code who knows more about her than Frerin ever will, her own son doesn't know her, can't remember her save for a quietness of a lullaby hummed late at night, for the tenderness with which she'd hold his hand, a tower in the depths of his small little eight year old frame. There are flashes. There are her eyes, closer to blue than their father's. There is her laughter. There is the way the world was flipped on its back, left clawing at the air for the purchase necessary to turn itself back the right way, in the Spring when she died ten days after her daughter's birthday.

“I think that's enough,” Frerin snaps.

“Okay,” Dain replies, after a brief second of silence. Frerin spoons a generous blob of jam into his jar and clutches his ladle a bit too tight. His blood suddenly climbs all the way out of his skin, and he thinks how easy it would be to fill it yellow-brown and break his mother's absence clean off from his bones. He swallows, he closes his eyes, and then he breathes deep enough to catch the tears on the sides of his throat before they get anywhere close to them. There's nothing to cry about, is there? The only thing he's found himself mourning is the ghost of a childhood that could have been–- nothing more, nothing less. A fool's errand and a fool's hope: what has happened has happened, and the kernel of fire he's holding inside of himself is proof of that well enough.

Suddenly the thought of cracking his bones doesn't feel like the worst thought imaginable, and Frerin drowns the regret that's coupled with it by focusing on jars, and jam, and the silence in his chest he's splayed his hands across.

* * *

 

Dain leans back with a sigh, stretches his arms and then slips off his prosthesis. He leans it against the side of the couch that he stretches out on, rolling his shoulders, stretching his arms beyond his head. Frerin doesn't seem to look up from his work, sitting cross-legged on the windowsill.

“Thanks for all the help today, Frerin. It's nice to have someone, especially after Shaw left to spend time with his grandkids. Tomorrow we'll be all ready t'head to the week's Christmas market, and--”

The silence he's met with is enough to have him drop the conversation altogether. He looks towards the boy, “Interesting book?” Dain asks, arms folded behind his head. Frerin glances up momentarily, and shakes his head side to side, a “sort of” gesture that he brings between his slightly hunched shoulders.

“Yeah,” he pins the book down open to the page he's reading with his elbow, and then knits the next stitch. One stitch, one second longer of quiet, good colors to catch his attention and something that glues his hands to an action. He's trying not to think. He's trying everything he can to simply not fucking _think_ , with the evening and the dark and the empty and the pain that gets that bit more deeper than during the day, and it caves in his chest and it tells him there's one and one way only to make it feel like it's a chest again, which is to kill the heartbeat and drain the veins.

“What're you making?”

“A scarf.”

“For who?”

“Myself, probably. I don't think anyone else would voluntarily want to wear a scarf this colour.”

The brown mess of stitches sitting on his lap peers over at Dain, and Dain looks at it from the comfort of a single half-cracked eye. He smiles and turns to lie on his side, his back to Frerin.

“Looks warm.”

“Hopefully.”

The conversation then reaches a natural pause, a new space of silence interspersed with the clicking of Frerin's knitting needles. Dain tries to close his eyes all the way. He simply finds himself staring at his old couch's beige lining, the threads poking at his nose all the way from the embroidery. The silence might be natural for Frerin, right now, but for himself? For himself there's a name, _Valerie_ , and an ache he hadn't felt in a while. He reminds himself that to mourn is to have the strength to accept that the absence is here to stay. Hard to do, when he's just drained the lake to find her bones again, for the first time in?

In ten years.

“Frerin?”

Frerin manages to shape his rapidly calming tongue long enough to let out an acknowledging grunt.

“How d'you feel about stargazing?”

A pause. The needles stop clicking.

“Depends.”

“Put your shoes on.”

“What, like _right now_?”

Dain pushes himself up and turns around to face Frerin.

“Yep. Sky's clear for once, I think.”

“Aren't you tired?”

“You're not the only one with too much silence in your head, lad. C'mon.”

Frerin smiles, recognizes an expression he'd snarled a few weeks earlier, when his vision was dark and blurred and swimming in tar, the taste of vomit much too real on his tongue to be anything but the product of illness. He sets his knitting aside.

“You feel up to driving?”

Dain shakes his head, “We can walk there. Grab my chair, it's by the door.”

“You _sure_? The road's all muddy.”

Dain dips his head, “That's why I have _you_ to unstick me, Frerin.”

Frerin grabs Dain's wheelchair and opens it for him, setting it next to the couch. He makes sure to lock it, and, leaning against Frerin's elbow, Dain lowers himself into it.

“Want me to grab the crutches?”

“Mercy, no. I'm just too tired t'walk. Grab my shoes, though. Really wouldn't want to get frostbite on the only five toes I got left.”

“Right away.”

“They're somewhere in the kitchen,” Dain says over his shoulder, as Frerin passes him to go and look. He bends down to check underneath the table, and when he doesn't find them, as he pulls himself back up his gaze meets that of a bottle of Baileys left on the counter. It starts in his heart, an expansion of black ink in water, and catches his hands like an itch between his skin and his muscle, air-tight layers upon layers of cells that all of a sudden _burn_. Frerin clenches both fists. It's an empty, the one that he's nursing inside his head, that's so much louder than its real-life counterpart, an empty made of pots and pans being beaten together, an empty made of shotguns going off, an empty made of a thin, thin, paper-thin whistle always going in his ears.

What he needs is something else. What he needs isn't anything he can find here, luckily. Alcohol would work poorly as a substitute, but the bottle of Baileys stares back nonetheless, as if it _knew_ the hold these things still have on him, despite the quiet small inching he's trying to do away from them.

It probably does.

“Frerin?” he hears Dain ask. Part of him, there, snapping its jaws, licking its lips with a grin that means _I own you_ , gripping him with all the strength its lean monkey fingers can give it, tells him not to answer. He kicks that part in the ribs with the same strength it's buried its sharp nails in his cheek, and turns to reply, “Not under the table.”

His tongue's departed his body, makes every word air bubbles escaping from his head buried underwater. Too many words and the oxygen ends, death like cement, a switching of shades from light to darkness, from alive to nothing. _But you're not dead_ , he reminds himself _, not yet._ Words just made sluggish, impossible to wrangle into shape, words much too strange. Words that he knows are leaving his mouth and still feel spoken by someone else.

“Ah, I can see 'em. They're were they should be: right near the damn door.”

Frerin passes by the chair again and grabs Dain's right boot. He hands it to him and then grabs their coats, scarves and hats, hanging by the door above the shoes. All bundled up, ready to face half past eleven PM at the end of November. Frerin's hat, Dain notices, is the same colour the scarf he's currently knitting is.

“All set?” he asks.

“All set,” Frerin replies, starting to push Dain out the door.

Dain unhooks and lights the flashlight he carries on his belt and illuminates the way directly in front of them, a solitary cone of white light large enough to make sure Frerin doesn't land them in any ditches nor catch any stones with the chair's wheels.

“Ah, _shit_. We gotta go behind th'house.”

Frerin frowns as he grits his teeth and bears down past a small spot of caked mud, “Couldn't you have told me _before_ we went outside? Last time I checked, you _do_ have a back door.”

“Yeah, that's why I said _shit_. To express my frustration at our current predicament.”

“And I'm not even getting paid for this. _Deplorable_.”

He maneuvers the chair until they're on the road that goes towards the woods, stretching out behind Dain's house, past the garage where the tractor and the other bulkier tools and appliances are kept.

“Turn left here,” Dain says, shining his light on what looks like a small hiking path that branches off into the beginning of the woods.

Frerin stops right at the beginning of it, “...You're one hundred percent sure.”

“Sure as day. C'mon now. Off we go.”

Dain shines the flashlight underneath his chin, eyeing Frerin from beneath the dramatic shadows it casts onto his face. He arches an eyebrow to tease, waiting, and Frerin rolls his eyes, “Well at least when they find our bodies strung up and skinned alive, we'll keep the newspapers busy for a couple of weeks.”

“Oh, _The Sun_ 'll have a field day with that.”

Despite the joke, however, Frerin feels the queasiness and nervousness gather as usual in his feet and his wrists, making his heart press ever slightly against his lungs, just in case it will need someplace easy to hide behind. Just in case. _Just_ , in case. The wild countryside of Scotland, after all, has a bit less light pollution than London and a good deal more dark corners. However, Dain sweeps the path in front of them with his dutiful cone of light, helping Frerin move along until the road starts to gently curve towards the right, a vein running towards the heart, delicately bending from the neck down towards the chest. They roll along for a few more minutes, and then Dain points the torch at a skinny dirt road that seemingly loses itself in the grove, to the side of the main path.

“Turn here.”

“In _there_?”

“Stop being such a chicken, London boy, and _turn here_.”

Frerin stops to hesitate, momentarily letting go of the wheelchair. He hears Dain sigh impatiently. Oakenshield can't stop fidgeting, eyeing the path in front of them through what little light the flashlight can provide them.

“Oakenshield.”

“It's just. Really dark.”

“No shit.”

Frerin glares at the back of Dain's head. Dain turns around, eyebrows arched in the space of skin exposed between his hat and his scarf. He narrows his eyes at the kid, mumbles something under his breath, and then starts pushing himself down the path.

“Dain.” Frerin says, flatly, without moving.

“Keep up, lad!”

“Dain.”

Frerin watches as Dain, outlined by the light of his own flashlight sitting in his lap, starts slipping into the darkness around them with a rustle of leaves and the quiet squelching of the wheels in the mud.

“Dain!”

A pause. Dain doesn't answer. Dain just keeps on going.

“Jesus. Okay. _Okay_. You win!”

Frerin, after removing his glasses and pressing his hand to his face, starts jogging after the older man. Dain barks out laughter, triumphant, when he hears Frerin's muddy footsteps behind him.

“Knew I could get you going.”

“Yes, hilarious. You're quite the comedian.”

Dain's laugh boils down to a giggle, “Getting stuck under a tractor'll do that to ya. Mind pushing me?”

“Swear to God, I'm gonna start asking for a salary. Ten quid a mile.”

The pang of joy he greets is something that he isn't very sure of. Not exactly safe, this stable footing, not anymore, to feel without anything else in between, but “not safe” in the sense of _not used to anymore_ , not “not safe” in the sense of something that hurts. Not only that, but to _greet_ the feeling, to want the feeling, to bask in it. There's a colour to this particular joy and he used to think there was just one, and it was the colour of Dis' name. But as Dain laughs and the light of the flashlight shakes with the joyful tremor of his hands attached to his billowing shoulders, Frerin discovers not without some satisfaction that it's there (different, of course) but there, in all the shades it can be-- it _exists_ , even in his interactions with other people, in his footsteps in other places, not limited to a single individual, not as binding as it was to have to rely entirely on a single person for happiness, all alone in a house made of the cavernous bones of ghosts.

They keep on going for a few more minutes, then the trees end, slope softly into a larger circle, and what greets them instead is a clearing, as small as a heart, kept safe by muscles of wood and dirt. The sky, above them, is skin of the most staggering black, freckled by stars.

Dain switches his flashlight off when they're in the middle of it.

Frerin stares at the stars and the stars stare at him right back, find the depths of the wounds in his gaze and brush their hands along their toughening scar tissue, and _sing_. It is a song made of shining, made of light, a song that soars and crashes, that explodes along the ridges of darkness, into the depths of space and of world, a song as old as time-- a song that many of them have started and already ended, gone in a blaze of gas, a song that reaches Dain and Frerin on Earth thousands of thousands of years after it had been sung, and yet tiny insignificant things like them get the chance, get the miracle to _see_ , even if the rest of the sky has moved on and continued its dancing to some other tune. Dain locks the chair as Frerin's hands slip off the handles and he moves back, walks back, turns on himself to see and drink it all in. Brighter than he could ever had imagined it to be (almost stupidly, he chastises himself, he's not a child, he should _know_ ), so much calmer than he could ever have wanted. The silence here is full, full to burst, a silence so alive it soars through his chest, a silence so sacred it makes him smile with a grin wide enough to burst his face at the seams. Dain watches the kid out of the corner of his eye as Frerin walks around the chair and then stands in front of him, arms wrapped around himself. His feet sing as they tread through the mud.

“So.”

“So?” Dain asks, surprised the silence has lasted so little. Frerin doesn't turn around, his nose still up in the air.

“What you told me today in the kitchen.”

“About Val?”

 _Val_.

“About Mum, yeah.”

“What about it?”

“It was _stale_. It sounded like something you'd say at a funeral.”

But, after all, Frerin didn't think he'd ever find her here, of all places: he thought she'd been lost the moment they'd buried her, he thought she'd been gone with the dirt when they dropped it on top of her. It turns out maybe she isn't, which is more hope than all the pain he's buried himself in in the last year. She is smiles, mostly, for him she is the quiet hum of song where for his brother she is roses. Together him and his siblings build her from scratch, build her whole, erect her a monument of dust suspended in light, with their memories of her as the foundations. The walls were always made of thin crumbling paper, sewn together by good intentions and the gaps left by their father's lack of stories (because he never speaks of her, he never speaks of her, he never will again). Now? Now those things might change.

Frerin doesn't say it, but there's a feeble hope that finding her will make him find himself. The thought itself isn't even a full thought, not yet, half-formed like a thin layer of cloth, orange sheen, floating in the breeze. He sighs, waits for Dain to reply, and his breath clouds around him. Incense smoke, in the sacred church of his heart beating in the middle of nature, a city boy finding his pathway to stars.

“Well. I can tell ye about the time we broke into her father's jewelry shop in Edinburgh, just to see if we _could_.”

Frerin snorts, “Whose idea was it? Yours?”

“I think you know th'answer to that one, lad.”

Frerin spreads both of his hands, palms towards the earth, darkness covering gloves covering veins like rivers, and the surprise transmutes into a chuckle to walk with his word, “ _Hers_?”

“Of _course_ it was!”

Frerin keeps his nose to the stars. Behind his back, Dain can see him shake his head even if he's staring at them, and his shoulders tremble with the bitter laughter he's laughing, but there's nothing happy to it, nothing darling, nothing bright like the way Dain spoke those last four words.

“You know when I asked for more-- I didn't ask for _lies_.”

“ _Lies_?”

“I doubt Valerie Oakenshield ever broke into anything at all.”

First things first: "Langròmach. Not Oakenshield. Back then she was only Langròmach." Dain corrects him, and then unlocks his chair and wheels himself with some difficulty through the mud, until he's next to Frerin, “I would never lie about her. _Ever_.” And the boy can't tell if he's jokingly offended or if it's the real thing, his anger at him, if there is any, if it is so quiet and subdued Frerin can't pick up its shades through the words, can't parse where it falls, can't follow the patterns of it. But he's learned to ask, or is learning to, which is what matters, plucking the courage from the knowledge he won't be scoffed at for speaking, “Are you angry?”

Asking still leaves his knees shaky. That is something else to work on.

Dain has to pause. The question isn't as unexpected as he imagined it would be, the boy's a shaking pair of hands anyway, of course he'd ask something as jagged and hunched over as his spine is. Still. Still, sometimes he still has to remind himself, the same way Frerin sometimes forgets Dain's missing a leg, that the boy might be... odd, for lack of a better word (and odd is one he dislikes already as it is, a fire brand no creature should have to wear on its flesh, an ostracism in the bullying because you can't look them in the eye, the boys at the bar who think they know anything about snarls of “cripple”, of “retard”, of “freak”).

“No, lad. I'm just explaining my answer to you.”

Frerin pauses and sighs.

“Okay.”

“Do you want me to continue?”

“No. Not yet.”

“All right.”

Frerin, after all, needs to discover who and what he is with the caution of a man dipping his toe in an ice-cold pool. As innocuous as the image of his mother breaking into his great-grandfather's jewelry shop can be, it clashes with what he already knows or thought he knew, and anything new is, right now, a bit too much to not rock the boat. So slowly into it, piece by piece, first the toes, then the foot, then the ankle and then the knee, and then maybe, just maybe, the whole leg.

Frerin watches the stars. Past them, the ridges of a great animal's spine, are the hills. He wonders if, had he been high, he would have cared about what they had to say at all.

 

* * *

 

As is customary for the Scottish countryside, a miraculous day of clear skies is exactly that: a single day. By the morning after, the sky's slipped back into grey cloudiness, teetering constantly on the verge of snow, threatening a frosty white downpour at any moment. Frerin gloomily glances at it from behind the comforting warmth of his glasses, clouded by the mist coming from his coffee mug.

“Lad, mind grabbing the crates in the pantry? I'll get the two smaller ones.”

“I can pick up crates on my own, Dain. No worries.”

“Oh, allow an old man the comfort of feeling useful.” Dain says, smiling, as he stirs his own mug of coffee. Frerin untangles himself from sitting at his customary spot on the windowsill, “Then _you_ can drive us down to Invergarry. If you want to, of course.”

“More than glad to. You're never driving again.”

Frerin laughs: it's the only comment he has to Dain's last remark. A nice laugh, allowed to be loud, his head thrown back in acknowledgement of his own clumsiness. But Fterin's just fine with not having to drive anytime soon: it's a complicated matter anyway, and cars are too tight and smell too strong for him to want to focus inside of one long enough to have to know where he's going and what he's doing. Dain's easy release gear shift makes things slightly easier, but he's still not a fan of the process at all. He doubts he'll ever be.

He goes into the pantry and uncovers the first crate of jars of strawberry jam, fragrant little packages of joy all bundled up and ready for Invergarry's Christmas market. Frerin finds it so deliciously typical of the countryside to have a Christmas market begin at the end of November, almost a month of baked goods and homemade crafts, a delight for the locals and what scraggly tourists might pass through, momentary gusts of wind in the stillness of small village life.

“Anything else we have to bring?” he asks, putting the crate on the kitchen table. The front door is open and from inside Frerin can hear the sound of Dain's pickup truck revving up as it mixes with the distinct smell of a winter morning, 9 AM, before the cold can truly begin to catch you by the ankles. He carries the second crate of strawberry jam and then the three of blueberries and stacks them up on the table alongside the other one. Then he pokes his head out and asks Dain, who's leaning against the side of the truck as he waits for the inside to warm, “What else do we need?”

“Grab the table and chairs in the garage, please.”

“Okay. Just let me put the crates in the truck.”

“Leave those, I'll do them.”

Frerin pauses. “You sure?” to which Dain frowns, “I'm missing a leg, lad. Not _dead_.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Frerin awkwardly rubs his hands against his chest and then walks back inside. He substitutes his fur-lined slippers for his boots, puts on his coat and pulls his hat down over his ears, and then goes out the backdoor, squelches his way up to the old garage and throws the doors open. The muddy light pushes forth the shadows of all the objects kept in there, the tractor and the pitchforks put away for winter, the two saddles he keeps on making a mental note to check the state of, an old cupboard that looks like it's been frequently used by mice as a luxury hotel and then, towards the back, a table and a couple of garden chairs. For a moment, Frerin looks at his skinny junkie's arms, looks at them _well_ , with the scars of the old tracks still there and the few desperate ones in the spots between his thumb and index fingers, the same arms he'd clawed at a few weeks earlier, blood burning like it wanted to drown him. Now they're here. Empty, save for the muscle they're made of. Supposedly supposed to carry two chairs and a table all across the yard.

Frerin starts laughing.

Laughing at _what_ , he's not entirely sure of, possibly the way he's destroyed himself and any chance at normalcy he might've ever aspired to. But what normalcy could a child who couldn't even look his family in the eye and sometimes just find himself unable to speak ever _have_? That's his second thought, enough to silence him and then cause him to laugh even harder, double over leaning against his knees, the sound exploding from his mouth hand in hand with white wisps of vapor, the visual proof that he's a living, breathing thing, nature reminding him somehow that his lungs are still doing their job. There it is, the freedom he's been needing: Frerin laughs knowing fully well there is nothing normal in what he is, nothing normal in what he was made to become, in what he did to himself, nothing normal in Frerin Oakenshield, no sir, not a lick of normal, not an inch of squeaky clean.

He is just fine with it.

The rage he feels is for other things right now, for people who could not see it, for those who thought he did not deserve to carry his difference, who thought that it was shameful-- but those ghosts have no space here. Here, a boy laughs and welcomes the cold Scottish air into his lungs, and then he straightens himself up again, takes his hat off and runs a hand through his hair, and then grabs two of the chairs and drags them back the way he came, around the house. He loads them into the back of the truck. Dain's climbed into the truck and is sitting on his hands to warm them.

“Thanks, lad,” he calls out after Frerin, and Frerin smiles at him and waves, and then goes back to fetch the table which is, God bless it, a foldable one, probably bought alongside the chairs. He debates for a moment with himself, always the eloquent interlocutor, how to best transport it back. But the solution, it seems, has red hair and a prosthetic leg.

“Let me help you with that.”

“You'll tire yourself out before we even reach the market,” Frerin dryly comments, not turning around. Dain walks up to him and stares at the table.

“You know, your problem's that you're approximately a third of the size that Shaw was.”

Frerin sighs, mockingly dramatic, and opens both arms, “Next time around I'll try not to get addicted to heroin.”

“Oh, you do that. Sounds like an excellent plan. Let me know how it goes.”

“Well then,” Frerin clasps both hands together, glances around the garage and finds a small cart, the red kind with the black wheels that children always seem to use to play with in American movies, and stares at it for a moment, then glancing back to the table, attempting to evaluate if it can be used as a viable transportation device. He decides without much thought it _can_ , mostly because he doesn't really see any other solution, and then proceeds to shove out the old pieces of wood that were piled in it. He crouches down and ultimately decides to let the table topple, slowly, guiding it with a hand splayed across its wooden back, until it's resting, balanced, on top of the cart. It can't go inside of it, because it's too large, but it can cover the red plastic cart like it were a lid, jutting out on each side. From the back it looks somewhat like an airplane, the door the wings, the cart the body.

“You're smart, lad.”

“Thanks. I try.”

He then wheels the table back to the truck and opens the back of it. He manages to get the table up halfway through, and then Dain helps him with the last of it. It hits the chairs with a dusty thud as the two of them let it go, Frerin's protests at Dain intervening drown out by Dain telling him to be mindful of the crates of jam. As Dain smirks Frerin frowns, and then Langròmach vanishes back into the kitchen (the door is still open) and reemerges with a basketful of what looks like fresh chocolate muffins.

“I'm afraid you'll have to share the front seat with these and the blueberry jam, Frerin.”

“Have to share with baked goods and delicious jam? Perish the thought, I don't know how I'll be able to handle it,” Frerin says as he moves the jam onto Dain's seat and then takes his place on the passenger side, taking the jam back onto his knees. Dain delicately places the muffins on top of the jars labelled “Iron Hill Farm” and then disappears once more back inside. When he comes back out he locks the door behind himself and puts his crutches in the back alongside the table and the chairs and the remaining crates of jam. He climbs up into the driver's seat, easing himself down slowly and surely, blessing his automatic beast of a pickup every time he has to turn it on and shift the gear.

“All set?” he asks Frerin as he maneuvers the truck out of the driveway. Behind them, the chickens watch them go from the warm shelter of their coop, clucking as the old rusted truck inches away towards the horizon. Dain taps on the steering wheel and then glances towards the glovebox, “Mind grabbing one of the cassettes in there?”

“What should I pick?”

“Surprise me.”

Frerin stares at Dain and then rolls his eyes, before maneuvering around the jams and muffins and feeling around in the middle of the mess until he finds the first cassette he can get his hands on.

“ _Talking to the Taxman About Poetry_ , by Billy Bra-- you are, _entirely_ predictable, and should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Predictable? _Me_?”

Dain asks it with a smile and a joke on his lips, not taking his eyes off the road.

“Billy Bragg? _Really_?” Frerin feeds the cassette into the player, “I'd never expect it from a friend of Dwalin's, really. Ever.”

“No no, Bragg's _far_ too mainstream for MacFundin. He's more into things like, you know, Crass and Subhumans. The Apostles.”

“I have no idea who _any_ of those people are, but I'm sure they say _fuck_ a lot and talk about bringing down the government all the time.”

Dain seems to think, for a second, and then nods, “Yeah. Pretty much.”

Frerin snorts and leans back, arms dutifully carefully holding the crates and the basket, and a whiff of freshly-baked goods reaches his nostrils. He sniffles, and breathes it in. It smells of something homely the way the jam smelled of homely, a comfort to be found in pots and pans and bubbling stoves, the kind of calmness that you can only conjure when you're making sure you have exactly three cups of flour and two of brown sugar, without forgetting the eggs and the butter.

Dain pulls into the parking lot of the Glengarry Village Hall, across from the church, where already a few trucks (most of them pickups like his) have been parked. “Just drop the crates and basket at the entrance. Mind handing me the left crutch, lad?” he asks, opening the door and pulling both of his feet out of the car and onto the steps he's put there to help him climb up and down. He wobbles down and Frerin hands him the crutch.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little. I'll take it off once we get inside.”

They walk inside, and Dain waves at an older woman with a silvery braid who's just finishing setting up her own table. On it, pumpkins and squashes of various sizes stare back at Frerin with a drowsy, content expression, probably unaware of the horrors destined to befall them, all the slicing and dicing and blending they will be subject to in the cold winter days to come.

“Jill! Jill, come over here. I want ya to meet someone. C'mon.” Dain pats Frerin's shoulder affectionately with his free hand, as Jill waves back and wipes her hands down on her overalls.

“Jill, this is Frerin. Frerin, this is Jill.”

Frerin smiles and is grateful when Jill doesn't extend a hand, “Pleased to meet you,” he mumbles.

“Please to meet you too, boy. What brings you of all people to a glum palce like Iron Hill Farms?” She's smiling as she says so, and winks at Dain.

“Frer's been helping me around a little ever since Shaw left.”

Jill's smile is now directed at Frerin, “Bit skinny to be working on a farm now, ain't ya?”

He thanks God she doesn't wink, too. He feels Dain's hand affectionately clasp his shoulder even tighter.

“Well, we're trying to get some meet back on his bones, it ain't easy. That said, d'you think George'd be willing to lend us a hand with the table and chairs?”

George, it turns out, is Jill Gwaihir's tall, burly son, who is more than happy to help him and Dain set up their little jam stand, unload the crates and unfold the chairs. Frerin considers the chair unfolding a tad unnecessary and overbearing, but Dain's glad to be finally able to sit down and take his leg off. All George asks for in payment is a single cinnamon muffin, and Dain is more than happy to hand it over.

* * *

 

Frerin sits down next to Dain, sighing and rubbing his face with his hand.

“You all right there, lad?” Dain asks, nursing a paper cup of hot cider. He's spreading his weight between his right leg and the table, crutches sitting next to him, and smiles at the old little lady who pays for her jam and a muffin for her grandson. Frerin shrugs.

“Lots of... people.”

“Want to step outside?”

“No. No, I'm fine.”

“I can do things on my own, Frerin.”

Frerin pauses and watches a tall man with an extraordinary mustache attempt to carry his pumpkin safely through a gaggle of nuns. There's a family of tourists right at the entrance: he assumes so because of the maps and rucksacks. The father picks up his daughter and puts her on his shoulders, no younger than four, as she tugs onto his sleeve. Frerin snaps his eyes away from them and back to Dain. His head's spinning, a little bit, lazily brushing a finger along the edge of his stomach, nausea seeping through like water in the ground, and he wishes there'd be some way to stop it, but it rarely ever manages to stop, only grow and grow and grow until there's little else in his ears but white noise. He closes his eyes.

“Tell me more about Valerie.”

Dain stares at Frerin, with his eyes closed tight behind the shield of his glasses, and walks back to his chair, sits next to Frerin so he's sure the boy can hear him over the chattering crowd, now that there seems to be a break, now that there seems to be an instant of quiet where he can sit and help the boy, simply help him, in ways that is different from holding his hair back as he vomits, or making sure that he's hydrated even as his body flushes out everything inside of it, or holding his hand as he rides the overarching trajectory of a shaking body, kicked in the face by muscle spasm and chills over and over and over. This is a different help, a quieter help, a deeper help, the kind of help Frerin will carry in himself for as long as he lives.

“What d'you want to know, lad?”

“How about the one time you broke into her father's jewelry shop, only because she wanted to see if you _could_?”

Dain arches an eyebrow, “I thought we agreed that was a lie.”

Frerin shrugs and then opens his eyes, keeps his gaze low and focused on the floor, “Guess I'm still curious.”

Guess he maybe believes Dain. She's like wisps of smoke he's hoping to find in the depths of ratty old closets, buried underneath layers and layers of ancient photographs. Dain scratches his beard for a thoughtful moment. What he knows, what he remembers and what others see can all be entirely different matters.

“All right. Well how 'bout this-- you go over to Ness' stand over there and see if you can scrounge up two bowls of pumpkin soup for us an' two slices of bread, an' then I'll see what I can do. But first y'take care of the nice old man that's coming up to us right now.”

He says it without maliciousness, with a tone that's simply just gentle, friendly teasing, if a little stern. Frerin briefly glances up at the rickety old man and smiles at him and then at Dain. His nausea's still there, but Dain nods his head in a small quiet way that's starting to begin to tell him that it's all right, he can do this, it's in his power to do so. And besides, the prospect of hot food and a story sometimes is enough to make limbs feel like limbs again, humans feel like people.

Frerin stands, and clears his throat, and greets the old man with a smile.

 

 

 


	27. x

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warning for nsfw content !!

**DECEMBER 21 st 1987  
KINGS CROSS STATION**

The gust of wind finds Thorin's hands beneath their gloves, a breath that makes his skin break into goosebumps and his shoulders shiver, fingers of ice snagging against his own and clutching. He rubs his hands together and then sticks them underneath his armpits out of habit more than anything, since he's wearing gloves, since he's bundled up, since he's wearing a scarf and his hat's tucked in his pocket and he could put it on his head if he wanted to. He shivers a little, and then gifts his hands back to winter and grabs his suitcase. The echo of it being dragged along the floor in the dead silence of a half past four AM station nips at his ankles as quickly as the chill tries to catch up with his hands again, now that his body warmth isn't there to protect them. It's too cold to light a cigarette, let alone want to light one, let alone rummage through his rucksack to look for his lighter, so he flags down a cab unprotected, too tired to interact and doing it anyway, he nods at the driver and smiles through the fog pouring out of his nose and mouth that is simple oxygen made smoky flesh.

The driver helps him load his bags into the boot of the car, after which Thorin thanks him before taking place in one of the backseats.

“Where to?”

“12A, Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill. Thank you.”

The driver eyes him from the rearview mirror. His gaze lingers across his face for a moment, and then goes back to focusing on the road. Thorin turns his own towards the window, and finds himself staring not at the lights outside, but at their reflection on the glass. They echo inside his chest like chimes in the wind, a quiet little symphony he finds himself entirely unable to care for.

“Long day?”

The young man in the back of his cab looks up from staring blankly out the window. He has blue eyes, which he figures is what people notice first about him, and a strong nose that looks like he'll never properly grow into. He seems to think for a moment about his question, blinks exhaustion out of his eyes long enough to bring in the smidgeon of energy necessary to say, “Somewhat. Lots of traveling.”

“Where you coming from?”

“Bulford.” he says without glaring at him for being nosy (which is rare, and appreciated), once more looking out of the window. He yawns and then rubs his face, from his forehead to his mouth, pressing a hand there. His brow's furrowed.

Maybe he's simply too tired to glare.

“The barracks?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, thank you for your service to our country, sir. It's very much appreciated.”

The young man does look up, this time, and smiles properly. He is proud of what he is and what he does.

“You're welcome. And thank _you_ for driving me home at four AM. What's your name?”

“John. And there's nothing to thank me for. It's my job, after all.”

Thorin smiles in response, and closes his eyes for a moment when he does, leans his head back against the carseat. There is a pause where he feels his entire body teeter on the verge of sleep, and then he wrangles himself back from there and opens his eyes again. The silence, this silence, is strange, the strangest kind he thinks one can ever find. It's the silence you share with strangers in those brief moments when they are _not_ strangers, when for a minute you've made conversation, and then the divide rushes back in and you both go back to what you were doing before the bridge was covered and the gap was filled with a layer of dirt thin enough to be blown away by the smallest of gusts. Thorin dozes until he gets home.

* * *

The door sighs in Thorin's stead as it opens.

He can finally hang up his coat and his scarf, free his hands from his gloves, kick off his muddy, wet boots, stretch his back. His rucksack gets dropped to the floor for a moment, while he hops on one foot to untie his boots. Behind him, his suitcase falls back before he can turn and grab it, crashes down the steps that lead to the door and lands on its back like a gigantic overturned blue turtle. Thorin curses under his breath and shoves his boots next to the small table he keeps his car keys and the unopened mail on. He stares at it for a second, the tiredness inside of him screaming at yet another setback separating it from the bed, and then walks over, picks his suitcase up, wetting his socks and freezing his feet in the process, and drags it inside, happy to lock the door behind himself. The cold knocks against it once with a bratty gust of wind, and then falls silent.

Thorin turns the hallway lights on. He sighs, this time, all of it the air in his lungs and none of it a door creaking in place of his own throat, and leans back against the door with a small thud, the back of his head lightly hitting the wood. He closes his eyes and feels not an inch of the relief he's been telling himself he should be feeling: he's been trying to fit these walls he's made for himself around the concept and the word of _home_ , and it's not working. Home here doesn't begin at the front door and end at the back of the garden. It doesn't reek from the walls and he cannot find it in his bedroom, there isn't an inkling of home in any of the floorboards. But home isn't Oakenshield Manor either, Dwalin's hands made sure of that, his smile and his eyes, the way he'd taken Thorin and whispered _come, see, let me show you what's outside in a world that's so beautiful it's burning_ , and how can the Manor be _home_ when it kept the secret of Frerin's addiction so tenderly inside herself, hidden in the shadows of his room, and how can it be _home_ when it cradled his mother's bones and Dis who sewed her skin around her own tight tight tight enough to see her shoulder blades?

No. The Manor isn't home.

Not anymore. It lost that right too many years ago.

Thorin finally lights himself his cigarette. He grabs his traitorous turtle of a suitcase and drags it up the stairs, one inch at a time, his rucksack abandoned on the floor at the entrance (he'll think about it in a moment), until he reaches one of the bedrooms, the one he uses, the one with the queen sized bed, the one that made him say _I'll take it_ , because two people can fit in a bed like this, in a house this big. His bedside clock tells him it's a little past five AM and while his body, with a quiet, small hiss that runs through his limbs in the shape of pure exhaustion, tells him he should go to sleep, the emptiness the bed carries makes the bottom of his stomach give. He looks at it blankly and then heads back downstairs to grab the rest of his things.

If he gets too tired, he figures, he'll just sleep a little on the downstairs couch. It's a small lie, his mind tells him, a small lie to try and fill the empty that the tiredness has brought, nestled comfortably in his chest right above his heart. Thorin rubs his face with his hands, more haggard than he thought this trip would make him, when he finds the bottom of the stairs. Nothing fills. That is how things are now, that's it. Nothing fills. He's smoking his first cigarette of what he knows will be a chain, and it won't fill him. He'll pour himself a drink, at a certain point, and that won't fill him either. He'll go and see his father and Dis sometime before noon, and that will only make him feel even more fragile and more tired. He won't sleep, even if he'll try. He's past the threshold of blissfulness, the precious moments he knows he can catch when the night is still young and his bones are soft enough to consent to warmth. Past that, and they're solid again, they're stone again, and sleep runs by like a train thundering away from you. He suspects he will be sixty years old and he will still be this empty. Empty doesn't leave, he's found out bitterly.

Dwalin could still remember his name in a million tongues, and he would still maybe feel empty.

He walks down the hallway again, picks up his rucksack and walks back up to the bottom of the stairs. There he stares at them, and the empty finally reaches the mouth of his stomach and becomes a light, light film of nausea. There are too many steps, too much energy that should be used, too much blood to get pumping, too much of everything that he should use to get from point A to point B.

He drops the bag at the bottom of the stairs and lights himself his second cigarette. That, at least, he keeps in the back of his pants, always handy. Inhale. Exhale.

He walks into the kitchen. His socks, now mostly dry, start sinking back into wetness, and for a second he doesn't really register it. Then his toes come in contact with water and Thorin lowers his head to see what's happening. A puddle. Very well. He looks up, to try and understand where the water's coming from.

The fridge is leaking.

“Oh. _Fuck_.”

It's the first words he's uttered in his house ever since coming back. Oddly fitting, he thinks. Not at _all_ strangely bitter. Thorin peels his socks off and tosses them to the side with a grimace. He then opens his fridge (empty, of course, he'd emptied it before leaving two months ago) and scans it top to bottom, fully aware that he has no idea what to look for. What time is it?

Five forty-five. He blinks at the clock and tries to think when he lost twenty minutes. Was it by the stairs? Before or after he picked up his rucksack? Upstairs, in the living room, when he stared at the bed? He sighs and stares at the wall then, his head moving from right to left, and drums a hand on the counter. There's a leaking fridge that feels like it's just kicked another one of his ribs clean off (the beating of his heart in an empty chest has already taken care of the rest), a complication he didn't feel like having to deal with. Which plumber will be open four days before Christmas? And which plumber would he feel like even talking to, in the state that he is?

None.

One.

But he isn't a _plumber_ , for fuck's sake. Thorin closes his eyes and rubs his face for the third time, an exhausted caricature of himself from moments before that's growing dimmer and dimmer by the minute. What a homecoming this has become, all running in circles and hoping not to collapse, welcoming the fall all the same.

_One_.

They haven't spoken ever since Dwalin drove Frerin down to Scotland. It would be foolish, impolite, to disappear for months on end and then reappear asking him to fix his fucking fridge like nothing had happened, to call up at six in the morning and attempt to make conversation. Thorin presses a finger to his countertop, black slabs of stone in a fancy high-tech kitchen, and the hem of his pants is slightly soaked too. He'll have to call a plumber either way, and he might as well call a plumber he knows.

And he loves.

And he misses, and what's a fridge if not an _excuse_?

That last thought scares him in a way it hadn't in a while. It's a thought he hadn't entertained in a while, either, a thought that feels so foreign to him, no longer foreign like unexplored lands and the wonder of hands finding his own, but the foreignness of coming home after a long trip, and finding it no longer makes you feel calm.

The irony of the image, of course, isn't lost to him.

The water doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime, either, so he should make a decision soon either way.

The phone rings once, twice, three times. Thorin has a momentary flashback to a scared seventeen year old cradling a phone receiver to the space between his shoulder and his neck, trying to convince himself to answer the phone while Dwalin on the other side probably begins to think his phone is broken. He decides to hang up right when the answer comes.

“Hello?”

Thorin feels something explode through the emptiness in a wave that's so sudden for a moment he doesn't _know_ how to answer.

“Dwalin?”

A pause. A long, thoughtful pause in which Thorin thinks he's hung up and all he's talking to is static.

And then: “ _Thorin_?”

The wave kicks again, into his throat. Not nausea anymore but something else, that then turns and seeps into guilt-- not over being born, but over having to _ask_ , and so early too. He pretends that the _r_ in his name hasn't suddenly become holy again, now that it's been immersed in Dwalin's accent. A moment. All it took was a _fucking moment_ , and months apart.

“Hey, Dwalin. Hello.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. No, I mean-- The fridge's broken and it's. Well.”

“It's bloody six AM, you know that, right?”

Thorin wraps the cord around his fingers and stares at himself in the hallway mirror. A sunken, tired face stares back. He snaps his gaze away and focuses on Dwalin's tone. Annoyed, isn't it? The wave in his stomach becomes a scream.

“Yeah. I know. I just came... back. From Bulford. It's been a really, long morning. The fridge's leaking.”

“You're seriously calling me at six AM to fix your _fridge_? Can't your father call a plumber?”

“I don't... live at home anymore.”

As he says it the realization comes like a river: he never told Dwalin. Never. Not once. He hadn't even considered including him in his plans. Plans that had involved, right from the beginning, consciously or subconsciously, his presence in the house he was going to buy.

Thorin swallows, throat suddenly dry.

“I don't live at... the Manor anymore.”

There is silence on the other side. For a moment, and then--

“You _moved out_?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“A little after Frerin left for Dain's.”

I moved out and I didn't tell you and we used to spend all of our days together and what happened what happened what happened God almighty _how did I let this happen_.

“Oh.”

“Listen, I can absolutely understand if you don't want to--”

“No, none of that. Where do you live now?”

It takes Thorin a moment to register.

“Wait, what?”

“Where do you live?”

“Twel--, 12A, Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill.”

He hears a badly muffled giggle and feels his own cheeks curl into a smirk of his own, “Why? What's so funny?”

“Nothing, Thorin. You're just being predictable.”

Oh, there comes the wave again, the ray of sunlight when he realizes Dwalin doesn't sound annoyed at all. He gathers himself around the phone, then, with a smirk that's becoming a bashful grin, “What can I say? The view's nice.”

Then there's laughter, real laughter this time, and the emptiness drains out from his body completely, and he breathlessly lets a laugh slip out too.

“All right. Give me a few minutes, and I'll be there.”

“Thank you. I--”

“You're welcome.”

“--I love you.”

Thorin hangs up before the other can say anything else and ruin his courage.

Dwalin stares at the space in front of him, phone clutched in his hand. He doesn't, know, exactly, how to move or in what way, how to gear his body into moving, how to kick himself out of the simple little stupor he's just descended in. Funny how it happens, when you hear words you didn't think you'd ever hear again, spoken by a voice you thought wouldn't say them ever again. Funny how it's the little things that burn the largest, manage to make your hands shake, let you sink seamlessly into the sensation your bones are floating in a dream.

“Who was it?” Balin asks, sleepily, from upstairs. Dwalin glances up at him, and what Balin sees is his brother's face burning with a smile he hadn't seen in a while.

“Just Thorin.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes. He wants me to fix his fridge.”

* * *

Thorin mops most of the water up with a few of his towels, and in the process finds himself sitting on the floor, back to the counter. He's lost count of what cigarette he's on, and the emptiness talking to Dwalin had fought back has crept in again, at the tips of his fingers, an ever present nudge that tells him there's too much, so much weight, that there's much debris to move, that his back still hasn't learned to stand straight yet, not all by itself. He flicks the ash into the ashtray, and then the doorbell rings. He scrambles to his feet, nearly tips the ashtray, and doesn't know what to do.

He feels stupid for having even said _I love you_. He feels stupid ridiculous and, most importantly, _small_ in his foolishness and risks.

He opens the door, at six twenty two AM, and finds Dwalin standing on his doorstep, tool bag in one hand, a paper one in another. He smiles and holds up the paper bag,

“I got you breakfast. Scones.”

Thorin's mouth once more quirking into a smile, “You got me _scones_.”

“I got you scones. Now, why don't we check out your fridge?”

Thorin nods and steps back to let Dwalin through. They bump together, they brush hands, and Dwalin hears himself _apologize._ Thorin sighs past his cigarette. Dwalin takes his scarf and leather jacket off, and then Thorin leads him into the kitchen. Behind him, Dwalin whistles, admired.

“How many floors?”

Thorin hesitates.

“How many floors, c'mon?” Dwalin asks again, as he sets his bags onto the counter.

“Four.” Thorin mumbles, “A cellar, the ground floor, one floor with a bigger bedroom, a fourth one with two smaller bedrooms.”

Dwalin leans against the counter, now, arms crossed across his chest. He arches an eyebrow, “ _Four_?”

“Four.” Thorin answers back, takes a drag from his cigarette. Dwalin doesn't reply: he nods, glances around the kitchen, and then bends down to pick up the ashtray Thorin forgot on the floor when he rang. He sets it down on the countertop, and Thorin absent-mindedly grabs it.

“All right. Let's get this fridge checked out.”

He gingerly steps out of his boots to avoid muddying the floor and then gets to work on the fridge. He unplugs it and crouches down to inspect the bottom tray.

“Grab me a bucket, please.” Dwalin asks over his shoulder. Thorin nods, almost startled, and puts the ashtray down before mentally tracing a map of his own home to remember where he puts the cleaning appliances. He disappears back towards the hallway again, and returns a few seconds after with a bucket, in which Dwalin feeds a tube that seems to come from the bottom of his fridge.

“Does this thing make ice, too?”

“Yes.”

Dwalin asks it knowing he wishes he could be asking other questions. Dwalin asks it as he frees the tube of blockage knowing that an _I love you_ maybe won't change things right away and won't stitch them back into place, Dwalin asks it wishing he could ask, _How have you been?_ and _Do you still love me?_ and _Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?_

Instead he asks if the fridge can make ice, and it can. He pulls out the wire he plucked out of his bag out of the metal tube, and with it a mix of ice, lint and dust.

“There we go. All done.”

“That's it?” Thorin asks.

“Yep. Easy peasy. You should really clean your shit better.”

Thorin, behind him, doesn't say anything. For a moment.

“I'm not home enough to take care of anything.”

“You buy a flat with four floors and then you're hardly in it?” Dwalin sits back on his haunches, screws the tube back in and reconnects it back inside. He slots the lower tray back into the bottom of the fridge and then wipes the wire into the bucket.

“I'm in the army.”

“Yeah, I _know_ you're in the army, Blue Eyes.”

There it is. He lowers his hands and swallows and stares at his feet. Above him, standing up, Thorin looks at him. He opens his mouth to reply and then closes it again. And then he clears his throat. And Dwalin asked about the _fucking fridge_ instead of asking him how he is. Thorin nudges his head, “C'mon, you brought me scones. I might as well eat them.” and knows that if he calls him Blue Eyes again he won't be able to stop himself from kissing him.

He wants him to call him Blue Eyes again so badly he doesn't really know how he manages to put all the scones on a plate because his hands are shaking too hard. Did he know this is how the morning would have ended? That coming home would have meant finding Dwalin, like this, in the cold of the morning, in the light of the sun barely risen, and he doesn't even know if he's _found him_ , if all of this hasn't been a mistake? He sets up a kettle as Dwalin sits at the counter, clambering up into one of the tall stools, watches him work, watches the trail of his back muscles underneath his shirt. Dwalin's heart decides to ache, right then, in his chest, in his eyes as he glances around a kitchen owned and barely lived in.

He breaks a piece off of a blueberry scone and chews on it without tasting, crumbs flaking the corners of his mouth.

“What tea?” Thorin asks to fill the silence. His voice shakes. Once. His voice tries not to run as fast as it can towards Dwalin, his voice tries not to hurtle itself into his arms, into this home made of flesh and stubble and laughter so deep inside his chest it feels like it comes from the earth itself.

“Black. Black's fine.”

“Earl Grey?”

“Sure.”

Thorin turns around with two mugs in his hand, two teabags floating in them.

“Sugar?”

“None, thank you.”

“How're the scones?”

“Good. Freshly baked,” he breaks the one he'd already started in half and hands it to Thorin, “Try it.”

Thorin takes the food and weighs it in his palm. He doesn't start eating it.

“How have you been?” he asks instead of chewing, or even putting it into his mouth. Dwalin scans his face, and he doesn't look up to see him in return.

“Good. All right. You?”

Thorin smiles, wraps his hands around the mug, “Busy.”

Each answer is staler than the next, each answer emptier, each answer faker, each answer a stone that much thicker in their defenses. There are walls between them where before there was a bridge. There are walls between them that stand against the roar of the wind and the scream of the sea, no matter how hard Dwalin begs them to crash into the stone.

If Dwalin were still a brave man, he'd reach across the table to find Thorin's hand, pry it away from the hot ceramic and find him, find him again in the emptiness they've made with their lives and their forgotten phone calls, forgotten smiles, with them asking about a fridge instead of the year in their lives that's shattered between them, so large and deep it makes him breathe all wrong. Thorin realizes he won't call him Blue Eyes again, that what just happened was a fluke and wishful thinking, was the past creeping in like a worm. And he remembers the emptiness that sunk into him only hours before. And he remembers the wave in his heart when he'd heard Dwalin's voice on the phone, and then Dwalin kisses him, leaning across the table, a messy kiss that's more teeth than anything, a messy kiss that forces Thorin's hands raised, against his chest, and he pulls back and breaks it more out of surprise than anything. Thorin catches his breath.

Then he walks around the counter and kisses Dwalin back before he can say anything, a kiss during which Dwalin slides off the stool and finds Thorin's hips and the wall and Thorin's back against it, and then they stay, and then they stay, until Dwalin has to breathe. MacFundin closes his eyes and rests his forehead against Thorin's. He swallows, as Thorin's hand finds the back of his head, as his fingers knot with his mohawk, for the millionth time that also feels like the first time, again, again. Thorin cups his face with his other hand and tips his head back, and then their eyes _do_ meet. Thorin smiles as the first inklings of a blush brush against his cheek. Dwalin smiles in turn.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“No, no, Blue Eyes, you're--”

But he never finds the end of his sentence, Thorin dragging him into a kiss that's of sunlight, Thorin dragging him into a kiss that's of life and love and remembrance, rediscovering how it all works and sings, how their pieces fit together. Thorin dragging his hands down his shoulders, across his arms, around his hips, Dwalin's hands on the back of his neck, Dwalin's hand, Dwalin's hand, Dwalin's hand that finds his lips in a gesture that weighs of reverence.

Thorin presses his lips to Dwalin's neck, then, and smiles. A small, breathy laugh, barely loud enough to be laughter.

“What?”

“Hello, you.” Thorin whispers, eyes closed. Every inch of his skin that Dwalin finds is like it gains weight and shape and substance, banishes the empty, Dwalin's hands that then grab the hem of his shirt, “My love, my love, my love,” every time making Dwalin's heart leap into his chest.

“May I?” he asks, thumbs brushing against Thorin's bare skin.

“ _Yes_.” Thorin replies, still whispering. His t-shirt on the counter, let go of like a rag, and Dwalin's hands against his hips, palms to skin, palms to heart, over his torso, up, towards his shoulders, up, to his neck and his pulse that Dwalin finds with his lips to the spot underneath Thorin's ear. Thorin sighs, as Dwalin kisses his way up his jawline, until he finds his lips, and he finds his breath, and his taste and his teeth and his tongue, with his own, his hands still tracing the contours of Oakenshield's body, as if touching every bit of him would make him real, would make him his again, would make him his life and love and breath again.

“Upstairs,” Thorin says, “Upstairs, upstairs, upstairs. On the bed. On _my_ bed.”

“All right.”

Thorin grabs Dwalin's hand and leads him up the stairs, almost running, half-stumbling. He laughs, cannot nearly recognize himself. Dwalin laughs too as he lets Thorin undress him, as he grabs him in the corridor, between the stairs and the bathroom and the room, and kisses him deep enough that Thorin has to bend back a little. Then Dwalin's hands snake to unbuckle his belt, to unzip his pants, to hook his thumbs in his underwear and slip it off. Thorin's laughing again, Thorin's bringing their chests close, arms around Dwalin's neck, Dwalin's face pushed into the crook of his neck. Dwalin breathes what he knows to be _Thorin_ , what he finds to be Thorin, feels the ripples of Thorin's body beneath him, against him. Then Thorin, naked, leads him to the bed and pushes him down onto it, back first, crawls in between his legs, hands planted on his shoulders. Dwalin's still wearing his jeans when Thorin kisses him, deep this time, and slow. Slow. So, so slow. So slow Dwalin has the time to wonder, to marvel, to run a knuckle along Thorin's cheekbone. Thorin above him, Thorin against him.

“Blue Eyes,” he whispers, a knuckle beneath Thorin's left eye, against the cheek, “Blue Eyes, Blue Eyes, _Blue Eyes_.”

“I love you.”

Again, small, quiet, like on the phone, _I love you_ , like it's been a day and not almost a year. Dwalin leans up, kisses Thorin while leaning on his elbows, and Thorin, Thorin, _Thorin_ , who sits on his haunches and brushes his thumb beneath Dwalin's chin as their lips meet, scratches lightly against his stubble, Thorin damned, Thorin foolish, Thorin beautiful, Thorin like the sun and the heart of the world. Thorin that moves his head to the side and kisses Dwalin's cheek like his skin holds a secret, and that secret could be both poison and antidote.

He kisses down, towards Dwalin's neck, he kisses down past his neck, to his chest--

“No, come here. Come here. I want to look at you.” Dwalin says, pulling Thorin back up towards him, and Thorin complies, with small kisses left on the edge of MacFundin's mouth. There is a ravine against Dwalin's jaw, there is the beauty of a mountain that lives and breathes through him. There is that, and so much more, there is the shine of a dimple, of the smile that Dwalin gifts him, so bright and wide Thorin cannot bring himself to smile back. There is Dwalin's thumb once more against his cheekbone. There is him, just him, right now, just this, this fire in his belly, this air in his lungs, these hands, these walls, these walls that do not matter if they're of brick or painted white or made of wood, because what matters now, here, is the way Dwalin's pants come open underneath his fingers, the way his underwear falls to the side without even a second thought. And then they're there, like this, naked and shivering with their hearts singing a cacophony in every vein and capillary resting underneath their skin and wedged inside their muscles, and they are here, and it is all that matters.

“I'm sorry.”

But Thorin whispers it anyway.

“I'm sorry I let things slide. I'm sorry I stopped calling, I'm sorry.”

“I know.”

“Dwalin--”

“I _know_ ,” he whispers, one last time, and he does, because Thorin is above him in a balancing act so quiet he wouldn't even think it happening if he didn't know about it, this hovering between guilt and passion, this moment before the leap that turns to flight.

“I love you.”

“I know.”

“I never stopped loving you. Not for a moment. Never.”

Even though sometimes it felt that it had. Even though sometimes it felt like there was Dwalin, and the nebulous notion that once they'd shared something, and precious little else.

“ _Shut up_ , Oakenshield.” Dwalin mutters, with a smile that kisses his eyes, and then Thorin's kissing him again, nearly breathless, and then he's moving up, and then his lips find the top of the scar, and then the world burns and Dwalin doesn't care, the universe collapses and all that matters is this, now, here, Thorin trailing the blood of the world down the bridge of his nose with his lips, all that matters is how their bodies always find the right place.

“I love you,” Dwalin says. “I love you, I love you, I _love you_.”

He savors every time like the prayer it is, still so dazed he can say it, he can say it and know he is listened, it matters, it's _theirs again_ , “I love you.”

A pause, where Thorin's lips brush against his and his hands find his, intertwined on the mattress. A whisper, barely two words, and the world on the tip of their backs again,

“I know.”

 

 


	28. xi

**Glasgow  
Fall, 1982**

Asunn bends her head back, and it's the curve of her neck, it's the dip of her hair beyond her jaw. Freckles, the traces of them, soft sun-kisses between her eyes, the bridge of her nose, her shoulders.

Dwalin can't see them in the darkness but he knows her face enough to know they're there. Like a comforting blanket beneath them. Like a comforting thought moments before falling asleep. She shivers, in the blanket and the jacket she's wearing, and bats his hands away before he can finish putting his own leather jacket onto her shoulders.

“No, I'm fine, I'm fine, keep it,” Asunn tells Dwalin, and all she gets in response is a knowing gaze, an arched eyebrow, a doubtful expression. She rolls her eyes.

“Oh, come on. I'm _fine_.”

“I'm not visiting if you get pneumonia. Let Dain bring the chocolates.”

She barks laughter, “Yes, as if he'd ever leave the farm. No, man's rooted to the damn ground as is-- there'd be no way to get him t'budge.”

And Dwalin snorts in agreement, as he finishes rolling the joint, as he looks back up to her.

“Got a light?”

She sighs and rummages through her pocket. The lighter she produces: made of plastic, pink, and decorated with hearts. Before Dwalin can ask anything at all, Asunn says: “I nicked it from work.” as if it serves as a viable, worthy explanation. She straightens herself out again, “I don't like pink anyways.”

She grabs the joint out of his hand before he can take a drag, and is met by a disapproving, scandalized grunt. She raises both eyebrows: it might be too dark to see her, but she knows Dwalin knows damnably well they're doing what they're doing. She hands him her beer in return, he accepts it without a word. An exchange on equal grounds, a satisfying passage of goods from one hand to the other: a beer for a joint-- good enough for Dwalin, good enough for Asunn. Besides, it's a dance they've done countless times before, in years and years of friendship, slowly and quietly when there were tears to shed and dry, loudly, drunk off their asses when there was laughter to be shared. A beer for a joint. A heart for a heart. A smile for a broken one, stitches for split lips, shoulders to cry on when mothers simply couldn't understand that daughters weren't made to wear their perfectly tailored suits-- down to the polished shoes, down to the heart of ice.

She takes a drag.

She stares at the tip of the joint.

She hands it back at him after a few moments.

“How's the face?” she asks quietly.

“It hurts.”

A small, bitter smile she gives the darkness and the neon lights below, beneath the school rooftop they're hiding on.

“Figured it did. Fucking bastard.”

Dwalin shrugs, “It is what it is.”

“Still. It's _your face_.”

“I know it's my face Asunn, thank you for the reminder.”

He doesn't thumb the stitches running down from his eyebrow to his nose, although he wants to-- he's wanted to ever since they started itching, a few days earlier.

“I'm just glad I didn't lose the eye.”

Asunn's staring at him again, he knows this, now that they can see a little better in the darkness, now that their gaze is getting used to the light that's shining towards them from below. “Dwalin.” she says, deadpan, utterly serious.

“ _What_?”

“I was _worried_. We _all_ were.”

“I know. So was mum. So was Balin. So was I. So was--”

_Thorin_ , but it isn't true because Thorin didn't know. Still doesn't know. He doesn't even know if Thorin's even still in the picture. He takes another drag from the joint and picks at the shoelaces of his boots.

“So was?”

“Nobody.”

“Is it the blue eyed kid?” Asunn asks, and the edge that was in her voice's smoothed down in favor of benevolent, friendly curiosity, a calm plain of water where first there was the bare crest of a wave, the skip of a stone, the circle of a leaf on the water. She's testing the ice, ready to break it and dive inside. Maybe the ice's cracked. Maybe it hasn't-- maybe Dwalin's ready to talk about it and maybe he's not and either way she will be fine with it because if there's one thing she's learned in loving Dwalin MacFundin is that thawing takes time and when it does beneath there's a river, and the river's a wonder of roaring free water.

Dwalin's reply is a scoff, and just like that she decides it's bound to be good enough for her.

There's instances of quiet. The sound of broken glass somewhere, and a dog barks, and Asunn shivers, and Dwalin eyes her and makes to try and put his jacket on her shoulders again, and she glares at him to refuse again, and the sound of the ambulance siren is far behind them and distant and part of the litany that's always there, the soft murmur of traffic beneath Dwalin's window just like if not even more wondrous than the roar of the waves by a pricey Brighton cottage-- unless of course there's a blue eyed boy to share the tittering waves with, and then few things can ever possibly be as beautiful.

“I'm moving to London.”

Asunn turns to stare at him. She pauses her words, pauses her gaze from the horizon far from them, she pauses all of her, in that instant of disbelief that sinks its teeth inside her long enough to have her turn with her lips curled in the joking happy smile that laughs _I know, I know you don't mean it, I know you just feel like being an idiot_ , _I know--_

“Oh. Fuck. You're being serious”

“Yup.”

“ _Why_?”

He glances at her and inhales the smoke and keeps it in his lungs until it's wound him tight and well and safe and then exhales.

“Glasgow's killing me, princess.”

Her scoff is neither friendly nor defeated. It's derisive. It's frustrated.

“Don't you dare run. You know you're so much better than running.”

“I'm not running. I'm picking my battles.”

“ _I'm here_. Dain's here. Your mother's here.”

She bites her tongue, blinks her anger back from the way it's welling too easily in her eyes. _Stop being selfish_ a voice in her head. Stop stop stop. If he needs to get out then he has to.

This is after all perhaps the dichotomy that drives her up the wall the most when the subject matter is Dwalin: he fights, of course he does, but his fights are small things that build up to big burning darknesses. His fights start at the back of bars and end at the heart of demonstrations. That's why he went to London in the first place, because Glasgow was small and constricting and deep dark stormy, tiring in ways only bones know the exhaustion of, and London was bright, London _is_ bright, London was first boys tight behind his teeth, and now, and now, London's _blue_ \-- London's blue like the sky. London's burning bright like the depths of an ocean.

“You'll regret it.”

“No, I won't.”

She stares at him for a few instants. It's instants that dip long, dip deep, dig across her skin and shift the way she sits. Stupid instants. Instants where she studies the map of his face that she's known for years and years. She has to look away.

“You'll fucking _regret it_.”

“Then if I do I'll come back.”

She bites down on her bottom lip, hard. And she closes her eyes. There is an angry screaming part, there is an aching aching anger inside her for a moment and it screams and it begs and it's bitter and petty and full full full of bile.

_Leave me here leave me here why fucking don't you, why fucking do--_

She closes her eyes. Inhales. Exhales.

_Does he not deserve the chance to heal_? Asunn. _Asunn_.

Dwalin looks back to Asunn after staring at his hands and he sees her smiling. Her eyes glisten. It hurts his chest and throat, tight fingers around his neck, and he reaches out to hold her hand. He squeezes. She squeezes back. A shaky inhale, a shaky soft inhale that breaks the teeth and breaks the heart and she whispers,

“Don't forget us, here in hellish little Glasgow.”

 

* * *

**Iron Hills Farm  
December, 1987**

There's noises, somewhere, there's noises and the echo at the bottom of his brain. He turns, awkwardly, feels the couch against his cheek and the blanket. Frerin closes his eyes again, because there's just the couch and far too much sunlight.

Again, the noise. Again, like it's scraping at his teeth. He glances to the clock on the kitchen wall, across the room. Eight AM.

“Dain?” he mumbles, and then asks louder, “Dain, is that you?”

“Nope.”

He opens his eyes again, reaches over to the coffee table and grabs his glasses, kicks the blanket aside, and stands. He stares at a red-headed girl, hair pulled back in a messy bun. She's just dropped her bag to the floor in the entrance, she's cleaning her boots off on the doormat inside. She shrugs off her coat, and hangs it up.

Frerin rubs his eyes and then fixes his glasses on the bridge of his nose better.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh. Hi there. You must be the Oakenshield kid.”

He flinches slightly, still frowning.

“Frerin, right?” Asunn asks, smiling. Frerin nods, staring at his feet.

“Lovely.” and then she brushes past him, drops her bag onto the couch, onto the blanket Frerin was sleeping under. She stokes the fireplace, she glances around the living room.

“Want anything to drink, sweet cheeks?”

Frerin shrugs. Asunn smiles.

“Dain!” she calls then, loudly, “Dain, you goddamned lazy arse!”

Frerin flinches and is then suddenly, keenly aware all he's wearing is a shirt and his boxers. Either Asunn didn't notice, or she doesn't care. Or she did notice, and she does care, and she's too polite to point it out.

Judging by the familiarity with which she's setting up the tea to boil, opening the fridge, breaking a few eggs into a bowl and starting to beat them that the third option isn't the case, and it's probably not the first one, and then it's definitely the middle one.

“DAIN, FOR CHRISSAKE!”

Frerin flinches again, and swallows, and steals into the bathroom with his pair of pants and his toothbrush. He sighs at the mirror, slightly cracked, at the sink that always clogs and he's learned to unclog with infinite patience. Behind him, Asunn, whoever she is, calls for Dain again. One. One thing at a time. One thing at a time. New person. Loud.

He opens the faucet. He dunks his head underwater.

_You can do it, kid. And you don't even need smack for it_.

The smile he gives himself. The small curl of his lips. That's something new. There. New. Soft and new. He emerges from underwater, stares at himself in the mirror, and then decides to peek out of the bathroom—just to see what's going on. Dain peers out of his bedroom door, at the end of the hallway that branches off from the living room. Footsteps, then, the sound of crutches thumping softly against the hardwood floor.

“Well, I thought I heard the delicate, lovely chirping of a sweet little bird.”

“Oh, you heard right, you fucking lazy idiot.”

“I also smell eggs.”

Frerin peers out all the way, and sees Dain, with his arms around Asunn, and Asunn, turned towards the stove, so her back's against Dain's chest. Frerin can't see from his spot behind them, but she's momentarily let go of the spatula and the pan to clutch his arms. He's buried his face in the crook of her neck, and she's smiling.

“I missed ya, lassie.” he whispers, “'s always nice when ya come here.”

“Saves you the trek up to Glasgow?”

She's chuckling, and glances up, towards Dain. Frerin closes the door slightly, avoids eye contact, escapes the sticky thought that he's trespassing. He clumsily puts his pants on, grabs a towel to dry his hair and face off, sloshes water around in his mouth to clear out the taste of the night and his abrupt awakening, and then steps outside.

There. He even fixes his shirt, smoothes it down. And clears his throat.

The two at the stove turn around. Asunn is smiling.

“Eggs?” she asks, holding up her spatula. Frerin stares at it and then at her face. Asunn signals to Frerin to come over, and the way he does so, slowly, softly, gingerly, reminds her somewhere in her head of a quiet, curious animal that's learned very slowly not to be scared. She serves the eggs, two for herself, three for Dain, and looks at the Oakenshield boy expectantly.

“Want any, love?”

Frerin looks startled, caught off guard.

“I'll just have some toast and jam, I think. But thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Suit yourself, dear.”

Frerin looks at her from above the rim of his glasses, in that soft shimmer of water on images, of beings on sunlight, half here, half fuzzy, a soft dream that he can softly ease himself into.

“I think I'll go check on the horses.” he says after the ebb and flow in his skull's been sufficiently filled with the sound of the knife against the slightly toasted bread. Blueberry jam, and the slightest dusting of butter. It's between his teeth, like the syringe used to be. There's still traces of tracks on his arms.

Frerin smiles at the two sitting at the table, and puts his boots on, takes his coat from the hanger by the door. Out he goes, into the sun and the cold and the quiet.

Asunn watches him go.

“If this is what he looks like after a couple of months of your cooking, I'd hate to know what he looked like before he got here.”

“Yeah. Not a pretty picture.”

Dain adds pepper to his eggs.

“Is he better, though, now?”

She asks it quietly, and Dain has to look up, Dain has to smile. Oh, oh, she might pretend she's tough, she might pretend she's seasoned and salted, she's seen the world, she might pretend she knows life and its many, many agonizing hardships – and she does, he's not thinking she doesn't. But there's such _softness_ underneath the shell, such _care_.

_Spitfire, ye just met him._

Dain nods, “Oh. He's miles away from what he was like when he came here. Jesus God.”

“A mess?”

“A damn mess. Wanted it to kill him, for all he cared.”

“Did he says so?”

“Wasn't hard to tell.”

Asunn falls quiet. She stands, and pours the tea, and pours the tea for Dain too, and adds honey in one and just milk in the other, and she takes the one with milk. Dain takes the one with honey.

“How old is he?”

“Nineteen.”

She stares at the door he went through.

“I met his brother, a few years back.”

Dain snorts, “Yeah. His brother's another... interesting one, from what I've been told.”

“Thorin? God, he's a mess.”

“D'you know they have a sister, too?”

“Dis, right?”

“Yep. Almost eighteen. Mustn't weigh more than six stone, I'd gather. I've never seen her, but Frerin talks about her all the time.”

“Christ.”

That's all she says, and then goes back to eating her eggs. She swallows them down with her tea, and then seems... pensive, pensive enough to stare at the table as opposed to Dain, or their hands when Dain reaches across the table and places his, so much bigger, so much rougher, on top of hers. She half-smiles, then, at least. There's a silence beneath it. Dain feels uncomfortably aware of it, the way it slips and spins and sinks. He looks to the couch, where Frerin usually sleeps, and then to Asunn. She's still pensive.

Here, the curious coincidence of being those loved by an Oakenshield, or those who love those loved by an Oakenshield: you find yourself caught, sometimes, by the weight of the world. Firestarters, that family is. Mad, mad, raving mad, tiptoeing between it all. Beautiful, inside, echoes of echoes of dances: Frerin, and Dis and Thorin, caught in a web, staying a float.

And the people around them who love them.

And perhaps to love them is to accept you will never really understand them, not entirely. Too much grit between their teeth, too much beauty. The quiet worship of three hearts, and the universes they hide inside of them.

Dain thinks of how Frerin laughs a laugh and it feels like spring's come again, and the love he has for that shy boy makes his cheeks curl in a smile. He gives it to Asunn, and it is no less strong, no less shining.

“Penny for yer thoughts.”

“None.”

“Oh, come on. Asunn, with no thoughts milling 'bout her red red head?”

Her half-smile widens, and her eyes flicker up to Dain's face. He winks.

“I missed you.”

He smiles right back at her words. She leans across the table, catches his lips with her own.

“Idiot. I'm just... puzzled, that's all.”

“Puzzled. All right. Puzzled why?”

“Not the right word. I'm just... ah. I hate it. They're _kids_. Their parents should've--”

“Well. Their mum's been dead for almost ten years now.”

“And their dad ain't really the best one there is. Yeah. I know.”

She sighs. “I dunno. Am I not allowed to be frustrated?”

“By all means, please do.”

Frerin smiles as the horse he's tending to whinnies softly.

“An apple, Spitfire, is that what you want? Want this?”

He pats his neck, waves the apple slices in front of his nose. Spitfire leans forward, and Frerin scratches her between the eyes as his other hand feeds her the slices.

“Good girl. Good, good girl.”

“You like them, don't you?”

Frerin, startled, whirls around. Asunn's standing at the other end of the stable, by the open door. The sun clashes against the snow outside, and glares angrily, a confused creature gifting warmth to a world that's still too cold to accept it.

He nods. “Yup.”

She tilts her head to the side, hands clasped behind her back, “Am I bothering?”

The boy in front of her shakes his head. She smiles.

“You sure?”

A nod.

“Okay-dokes.”

And she walks towards him, and stops to lean against the wall near him. He thinks of Dis, very briefly, and then swallows the thought back into his heart, and tells himself to call her sometime during the week.

“You come here often?” he asks instead, in what he hopes is a successfully enough convincing imitation of smalltalk. Asunn smiles small at the question.

“Not as often as I'd like to.”

“Where're you from?”

“Oh, all over the place. Right now, Glasgow.”

She buries her hands in her pockets.

“Been there for a while now, actually.”

“And do you like it?”

He runs both hands up and down Spitfire's nose. Softly. Slowly. Like one would do with an old friend, or an anchor to a place, or a heart.

“Yeah. Bit lonely.”

“Why don't you move here, then?”

Asunn stops picking at the splinter on the wood. She looks at Frerin, and he feels her eyes on the end of his vision, at the fringes, along the periphery.

“I'm not ready yet. That's all.”

Frerin nods.

“How long are you planning on staying this time, then?”

“Probably a little past Christmas.”

“How long have you and Dain been a thing?”

She bites the tip of her tongue between her front teeth. He feels the weight shift. She hasn't crossed her arms over her chest, but he maybe can feel underneath the sudden silence a certain gravity of evaluation.

“Sorry. I'm being invasive.”

“No, no, it's fine. It's not like it's a secret.”

There, the silence again. Frerin bites the insides of his cheek and tries to remember how to be a person with a person he's not used to. He smiles sardonically at Asunn. Asunn smiles back.

Frerin feels the coil in his stomach relax, if only ever slightly.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly -- apologies for the long, long absence. This semester has been very, very time-consuming, and given the fact PBL is so important to me, I want to be able to give it my full attention. As such, it's taken me a while to get my writing back on track. This is a relatively shorter chapter, and serves a bit as a transition.  
> Secondly -- if you're still reading this, thank you so, so much. Your support means the world to me, as always. thanl you for believing in me, and this verse, even when sometimes it takes a little longer than usual.   
> Much love, Matty.


	29. xii

**17 December 1987**

She watches intently, quietly so. The light creeps along the edges of her vision, hovers at the tip of the candle. It dances, traces the contours of Dis' breathing as she observes, and then dips, down, pirouettes around its axis. It runs in its small confined space, in its endless plane of wick, its field of twisted string. The candle is yellow-gold, marries well to the fire it's nurturing.

Robert's humming low. He lights the three candles in the menorah, and then sets it down. Dis' legs are tucked beneath her body, huddled as she is on Robert's couch, a blanket on her legs and his sweater around her shoulders. She's watching him from behind, as he leans down to pray. She's quiet as he does, quiet and sullen and basking in the sound his voice makes, the slight press of it against the back of her wrists. She wants to reach out. She wants to kiss him. She smiles at the fact they're sharing such soft, sacred silence.

Robert places the candle he used to light the other ones back in the middle candleholder, and turns to Dis. He smiles, too, then, in the soft orange glow.

“Turn the lights on, darling?”

She nods and clambers over the back of the couch, blanket left behind, turns on the lights by the entryway. It makes both of them blink, sudden ocean where first there was just a trickle, just a thought where this is a full-blown sentence. _Let there be light_. The thought association makes her snort, amused.

“What?”

“Biblical portents.”

The answer certainly doesn't seem to sate Robert's curiosity, and it shows in his eyes, in the furrow of his brow, in the way sometimes he looks at her like he's still trying to fit every piece back in its perfect box. It makes Dis smile. He's sitting on the couch. She sits herself on his lap, legs on each side of his hips, chest to chest. Her arms rest on his shoulders. She takes the chance to tuck a loose strand of hair behind his ear, and kiss the tip of his nose. That makes him smile, curiosity sated or at least seeping away. He answers with a soft kiss of his own-- a little deeper than the soft peck she'd given his nose. Not that she minds.

No.

No, she doesn't mind a bit.

“Bizarre associations. That's all.” she answers, once the kiss is broken, once they're both catching their breath.

His hand to cup her cheek. She's put on a little weight (it is a heavy, tiring ordeal, and it frustrates him. He cannot imagine how it feels for her, nor does he have the arrogance to assume he does), he feels less bone when he caresses her, when she presses against him. Then he pats her, lightly, on the cheek, and it's her turn to frown. What an interesting dance relationships always are: this ebb and flow of bodies, this delicate agreement to exist and fill each other's empty spaces. An arm moves and the other follows, and the space is kept safe by shadows.

“Move, I have something for you.”

“For me?”

“Sure. It's tradition.”

“But I didn't--”

His finger to her lips. She frowns against it-- oh, it drives her _mad_ , this slight edge of condescension that he has with her, that they _all_ seem to have with her, youngest daughter, smallest sibling, crazy fucking girlfriend. “There's no need, Dee. Now c'mon, scoot off.”

It drives her mad for a moment, and then she swallows it back down. His eyes are too soft and kind, she thinks, for her to stay frustrated too long. Dis does as she's asked, and tucks her legs beneath her body again when she sits next to him. Robert stands and disappears into the bedroom for an instant. He returns, and he's holding a box. It looks like a jeweller's box, and it only makes Dis' frown deepen.

He _smiles_ at the frown. It takes all that she has in her to not smile back, and instead keep her thin veil of annoyance plain on her face: a mask as much as it is a true emotion. He sits next to her, drops himself onto the couch so the cushions softly hiss and she feels the shift of weight where he wasn't and then was (surprising how this metaphor will creep back in her bones, given time, flipped on its head and so damnably bloody), and she can't help but peer with a smatter of curiosity. Robert hands her the box. It's bigger than a ring box-- perhaps a bracelet? She weighs it in her outstretched hand.

“Go on, open it.”

“I'm _getting there_ , give me a moment.”

Which makes him quiet down and decide to wait. Dis runs her finger along the silver cloth wrapping, along the white ribbon. The box is almost as nice as the object inside, she thinks, she assumes. Another thought that makes her smile. If Robert peers curiously at these smiles he just hasn't learned to decipher yet, then she doesn't mind, or notice, or care. He's decided to take the puzzle she is with him in his pocket, and Dis firmly believes that it is not her responsibility to ensure he is capable of reading it at all moments and at all times. It is simply too much of an effort, to make sure the comfort of others is maintained and observe through the careful way she dances around her own complexities, these small things sewn in the larger fabric of her, images she thought of as flies at first on her porcelain skin and now sees much more as diamonds on a carefully embroidered cloak. He will have to make do with not understanding her always, and she will have to make do with knowing he loves her nothing less because of it-- soon the annoying nagging behind her skull that her puzzle and non-normalcy is the only reason he cares will ebb away too, and what will be left will be warmth at his simplicity, at his calmness, the way his breathing's so _steady_ against her cheek when she falls asleep on his chest.

So she opens the box, and inside it is a necklace of silver and it is a thin, thin chain for a thin neck, and at the end of it is a diamond. It catches the light. It gifts it back to her, plucking shine from the world and placing it into her outstretched palm. She holds it, and doesn't notice she is holding it reverently. She holds it, and Robert watches her hold it.

After a moment that's longer than life and all the time in the world, she says: “Thank you, Robert. It's beautiful.” and then looks up at him and adds, “Help me put it on?” and before he can answer, she's handing him the necklace and turning around and lifting her hair, and Robert sees the back of her neck, and the dust of freckles she has there, on her shoulders, on her face when it's summer and the sun tries to claim its due amongst the London clouds.

Robert loops it around her neck. She feels the pendant rest on her chest, against the thin fabric of her shirt, feels the tips of his fingers brush against her shoulders, and there is a moment where there is just that: a quiet softness she is teaching herself, bit by bit, to accept. Then Robert's lips press down to her shoulder, and she watches the flames dance along the menorah, but she doesn't push him away. It is, perhaps, a small victory that she does not want to, and not that she is forcing herself not to.

Still, she watches the menorah, and the flames lick the electrical light around them. Robert brushes his lips along her neck. Dis closes her eyes, and then sighs.

“Do you believe?” she asks, as Robert's lips find her jawline.

“What?”

“Do you believe in God?”

He pauses, for an instant.

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“Then why do you burn the candles?”

Another pause. She is grateful he is hiding his annoyance, if there is any, and perhaps she cannot realize that he loves her for the strangeness and the charm both, and the questions she always seems to ask that are slightly skewed, off-track with the situation. _Do you believe_ , Dis Oakenshield asks while her lover's lips are tracing miracles along her skin – and perhaps to ask in moments like these is a form of worship in its own sense, an unspoken subconscious recognition of the holiness that love is.

“My mother does. It makes me feel closer to home.”

Dis shivers when his lips find the nape of her neck. She smiles, has to lean back, welcome his lips to her throat that he gifts her without second thought.

“Is God not love?” she asks, and for an instant wonders where her nihilistic brain came up with that. She's never known God as being love-filled... or particularly friendly. He is a thought at the bottom of the page, something her father believes in more than she does, and perhaps ever will.

“Yes.” he answers, and this time Dis notices he hasn't stopped to think. His heart is speaking for him, now, his language the language of bodies. The _yes_ is a whisper. When his hands find the zipper of her dress, it is the logical continuation of an already begun sentence.

“Then perhaps you do believe.”

Then she turns, dress slipping off her shoulders, and the necklace is cool between her breasts, and she is pushing him back-first onto the couch, pushing herself onto him, and the syntax of existence melts into the whisper of emotion, and then there's just that, and God loves between them, through them, with them.

* * *

**20 December 1987**

Asunn's laughter travels across the room, loud, joyous, bubbling, and presses itself against the cold outside. Dain smiles, her back against his chest, and his answer's a kiss beneath her ear.

Frerin nurses his mug of hot tea in both hands, and smiles as he stares at the liquid sloshing back and forth.

“Guess you liked the joke.” he mutters, playfully, glancing at her briefly over the rim of his glasses and the hair that's flopped in front of his eyes. She snorts, delighted.

“Didn't know you had it in ya, kid.”

“Told you he was full of surprises,” Dain says, and it makes Frerin's smile widen because he sounds so _serious_ but Frerin knows there's perhaps half a shade of sarcasm and _I-told-you-so_ beneath it, the protectiveness Dain takes with him whenever people think that Frerin's quietness doesn't mean that the boy's more intelligent than most, as all his siblings are, and then pats Asunn on the hip, “Lemme up, love.”

She scoots aside, and Dain moves off the couch to get to the kitchen table, leans his crutches against the wood as he pours himself more mulled wine. Asunn is still eyeing Frerin, her gaze shining with every city light she's ever seen.

“What?” Frerin asks, catching a glimpse of it. Her cheeks are flushed red, bright red, the red of happy thoughts and good company and a slight drop of alcohol too much. Asunn just shrugs.

“Aren't I allowed to be glad when you're happy?”

_You barely know me_ he wants to reply but bites his tongue just on time. The warmth knowing someone cares is enough to silence it, quiet it, make it soft and less jagged in his throat. It's all right to allow the fragility in, all right to allow them to care, all right to know there is softness in the hands around him, in the words, in the space and the light.

“What I always used to say about Val,” Dain says as he makes his way back to the couch and Asunn moves and he's back in his place and their spaces are filled with the right shapes, “was that Hell would freeze over before her smile stopped brightening up any room she'd walk into,” and it's true, it was true, it remains true. Frerin has echoes of the shine of it beneath his tongue and somewhere in the corners of his vision, always has, always will, less her smell more her laugh, more the sound and the flutter of wings against glass. A butterfly? A bird? Her heartbeat? Does it matter, in the grand scheme of things-- it's just that, just a flutter, what matters is the sound and the pitter-patter of life-memory that it brings.

“You certainly got that from her.”

Frerin looks back into his mug, into the tea and the honey and the dollop of lemon, and smiles, allows it to be wide, protected by his hair, by the shadows that dance softly slowly across his face, outside in the comfort of the warmth of the house, the fireplace that crackles and pops like the quietness of life as it continues its cycles into ash. All is, for a crystal-clear moment, quite perfect.

And Frerin smiles his mother's smile.

* * *

**22 December 1987**

He wakes up to the smell of cooking, creeping up from the stairs and into his bedroom. Thorin blinks against the light that isn't really light at all, the grey mass that drips from the December sky into his room from the wide bay windows. He glances to the side and finds Dwalin's side of the bed carefully made, the pillow and the comforter both already tucked into place. He frowns at it, but thinks little of it. Then he throws the covers aside, finds a pair of clean boxers and sweatpants, and throws them on. The skin on his chest becomes gooseflesh, the back of his arms a soft shiver. He frowns at the landscape outside, too: not even snow, just slush. It looks devastatingly _wintery_ , and he knows there's not much he can do about it anyway.

He walks down barefoot to the sound of a sizzling pan – or two, it looks like, with a third on its way. Dwalin looks up from the stove and turns around to see Thorin. He smiles and then tuts.

“Ruined my surprise.”

“What? Breakfast in bed?”

“Merry Christmas.”

Thorin scoffs but the corners of his mouth are climbing up, up, up, “It's in _three days_ ,” and has to stop to simply wait, and see Dwalin, and take him in. Dwalin, standing in his kitchen using his pots and his pans and his eggs, making what looks like an omelet with sausages. Dwalin, already so accustomed to wearing what looks like _his_ tartar dressing gown and, well. Nothing else. Thorin clears his throat, “You should close it, at least.” and he glances towards the kitchen windows that give onto the street.

“Nonsense, Blue Eyes. The neighbors love me,” but then he's laughing as Thorin marches over to him, “they can't even _see_ , Thorin, _Thorin_ , they can't even --” as Thorin closes the dressing gown and ties the belt.

“There. Decent.”

“ _Decent_.”

“Yes.”

Thorin goes to the fridge and pours himself a glass of orange juice, no pulp. “Make sure to brush your teeth before that, Blue Eyes.”

“Will do, Dwals.”

Dwalin reaches over and casually ruffles Thorin's hair. It makes Thorin give him a smile as wide as the world. How easy. How easily they've found their domesticity, their place amongst each other's lives when they've fallen back into each other less than a day before. Thorin looks at Dwalin over the rim of his glass.

“Do you want any?”

“Orange juice? I'll pass. I made coffee, if y'want some.”

Thorin grabs a second mug from the cupboard above the sink and pours himself some. He adds a little milk, a spoonful and a half of sugar. Then he sits on one of the stools at the table and watches. Dwalin gives him a sideways glance.

“You're sitting there with no shirt on in December, and _I'm_ the one who ain't decent?”

Thorin's answer is his tongue, stuck out almost comically. Dwalin stares at him, puzzled, and then starts laughing and Thorin narrows his eyes, but he's smiling. If he's confused he doesn't show it. If he's in love he doesn't let it leak further past his shining eyes.

“Oh, I'd forgotten how _cute_ ye could be!”

Forgotten. What a strange word to wear with each other. Forgotten. _Forgotten_. As if they'd allowed each other the space to vanish and slowly ebb away and become shadows, which they had, slowly but surely. Caught on time. It's what matters. _Caught on time_. It's a thought that, Thorin knows, almost killed him, drained him of personhood, left him needing and aching for something to fill him. He doesn't know what it did to Dwalin and part of him tells him with certainty that Dwalin didn't care. That part is a part another part of him knows not to listen to. That part is a part that just lies. He knows, because he can see it, see it in the soft reverie Dwalin has with him, in how slow his fingers dance along his jawline. Like here, like now. Just so. He inhales softly when Dwalin reaches to brush his fingers along the bridge of his nose, and exhales when those same fingers brush along his lips.

“I don't think I'd ever be able to tire of you, Thorin.”

A sentence that makes Thorin laugh, half-awkward, half-smitten, mostly baffled baffled baffled. Here, like this! How easily the softness has come back! How delicate it feels to let the sunshine seep through him, winter winds be damned, bleak December morning set aside! How easy, how delicate, how _pure_.

Thorin wraps his hands around Dwalin's hips.

“Can the eggs wait?” he asks, smiling. His eyes shine. Dwalin's knees almost (almost) go weak, his resolve in seeing brekafast done almost dissolves. But then he shakes his head, wisely, and it makes Thorin laugh, crystalline. Dwalin presses both hands to the back of Thorin's neck as Thorin arches an eyebrow, tugs lightly on the dressing gown, “Well then. Make eggs, and I can dutifully watch, and then, perhaps...”

Perhaps, perhaps, _perhaps_. If you were to ask Dwalin to compare the boy he sees in front of him to the man he saw the night before, thin and fragile and drawn inside his pain he would tell you _no_ , _no_ , this isn't the same person at all – and yet he knows.

He knows.

He wouldn't love him if he didn't know. He wouldn't be _his_ if he didn't know. He's here. They're here. He pulls Thorin in for a kiss, and knows, as if he'd ever allow himself to forget, exactly how their lips will feel against one another. Then, there, fleeting, to his jaw: Thorin's soft sigh, his lidded eyes. His smile. Dwalin pulls back and is greeted by it. It feels like resurrection: it always has, and always will, even after Thorin will be dead.

“Perhaps the eggs can wait,” he whispers, turning off the stove. And Thorin laughs. 

* * *

**25 December 1987**

Balin sits in silence. There's little to say, alone as he is in the room, feeling the warmth fill his bones, bask in the silence. The silence. The silence. He closes his eyes, mug of coffee warming the ache in his arm (too much typing, too much sitting at a desk) and he inhales very slowly. Then he exhales. The smell of a cigar. Footsteps behind him.

Thrain sits down on the armchair opposite Balin's, in the heavy weight of his silent study. Christmas. Barely here, barely there, already gone. Dis left him her present, a knitted sweater, on his desk before leaving for Robert's, before leaving to spend the night at his apartment. Thorin called (and Dwalin was holding him, listening intently, curious perhaps and maybe slightly irritated, his forehead on Thorin's naked shoulder, his fingers lazily tracing circles on his back).

Balin gave him a fountain pen.

Frerin didn't call at all.

Thrain smokes in a still, manufactured silence Balin knows at this point there is no point in trying to break. He simply sits and waits for his friend to speak, if he feels like he must, if he feels inclined to do so. And Balin is glad for it, sometimes, like this morning, 10 AM and a damned drizzle of snow already. From the window, he sees it and can hear it in its silence. It echoes, as it always does when he's looking at it, his mind trying to fit the silence with the noise he feels he should expect.

Thrain snatches him from his reverie with an awkward cough.

“Well. Let's go.” he says plainly, and Balin says nothing at all in response. Let him decide. Let him determine the manner shape and form of his own grief.

* * *

White noise in his heart where his body should be. White noise in his head, in the veins of his wrists. Thrain flexes and bends his fingers and stands there in an utter dreadful silence. A silence. A silence.

He's taught Thorin well how to live in this silence. He's taught himself how to let it devour him, spit the bones and suck the marrow from them. He thinks it isn't important, that half-surviving half-digested is the best he can afford. He thinks very little is important at any given time. He finds that apathy sits well and nice on his chest, and its weight has lost its uncomfortableness over the years, become soft and swaying. He wouldn't know what to do with himself, if he didn't let the emptiness live for and breathe for him.

_Valerie Oakenshield_. _Born 3 rd March 1948. Died 12th May 1977. Though my soul may set_ ...

Balin, hands thrust in his pockets, watches Thrain as he walks to the grave to wipe it of the snow that's already fallen. There. Already more legible.

_Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light_.

Balin sees Thrain slowly run his thumb along the _t_ of _light_ , scrape at it with his nail, scrape the ice that's gathered there. Silence. It's stopped snowing for the time it took them to reach Highgate Cemetery. Now it's starting again, now there is company and clarity in a sky that is too cold to weep. Balin watches the snowfall. Thrain stands very still, black coat against a white background, against a pale grey headstone.

Silence, after that.

The rest is silence.

* * *

**25 December 1976**

Christmas, then, in its cold small heartbeat. Beneath a blanket of snow, Oakenshield manor sleeps. Beneath a blanket of snow, the soft pitter-patter of a ten year old boy's feet down the stairs. Socks against wood. Heart against chest. His happiness like a birdsong that's happening far too soon, spring barely even thought of as an aftermath.

He stops halfway down the stairs, eyes wide and his hands wrapped around the wooden banister. His mother meets his gaze above the sock she's quietly stuffing. Early, both of them, up earlier than anyone else: it's not even 6 AM. He thinks he's being quiet, but she heard the pitter-patter of his feet, and she smiles as she dutifully, slowly, ties the bow of the last package. Then she looks up, clear eyes with her youngest son's kindness. Thorin smiles at Valerie when she gestures for him to come down the rest of the way. She holds out her hands to him in a gesture that has not yet become bittersweet nor bitter, just exists as it is before death has been allowed to taint it. He takes them, and she smiles and squeezes them: the sensation of pressure around them, covering his cold fingers and warming them.

“You're up early, Tho.” she says. He nods as an answer, and sits on the couch behind her.

“Can I stay?” he asks, his feet brushing against the carpet. He's still not grown fully into his height, still not learned how to navigate the space fully, he and his gangliness, the height and the shoulders he'll develop into as the years go by. Now, he is a child. In ten years, he'll be a man, beautiful and capable of a fury that is as deep as his love. A boy will fall in love with him. It will be like discovering honey all over again for the first time.

“Can I see what's in mine?” he peeps up, after his mother's gone back to stuffing the last of the stockings.

“No.” she says patiently, with a smile, “Where's the joy in that?”

Where's the joy in that, then, where's the happiness in having it all at once, all now? Where's the point and objective of knowing, beforehand, of filling the void a fraction of a day before everyone else? Where's the joy in that, in knowing, in want being satiated so simply and early?

He shrugs. “I'm impatient.” A thoughtful pause, his chin on his palm. “Then can I see someone else's?”

This makes her giggle: still low, though, to not wake anyone up. She laughs and she covers her mouth with a hand. She laughs and she tilts her head to the side. For a moment she is not a mother of three and she is just a girl, delighted, for a moment she is who she is: Valerie. Her name is as light as the snow falling outside.

“No,” she answers again. She brushes a fingertip softly against Thorin's nose. His expression barely shifts: wide-eyed, reflecting, watching his mother with that soft unease his brother still carries inside him, even into adulthood, even into illness. He will outgrow it. At sixteen, however, it will still be there, still be his. At ten, its presence is as soft as a butterfly's wings.

He will not remember this morning: it will melt far too easily into the terrifying thought that she is gone gone gone, and then the rest of it will fall apart with the passing of the years and of the seasons. There will still be, perhaps buried in the depth of the crackling, soothing fireplace, the endless soft smell of wood that's been charred, rich and maybe just a little bit like _home_. Not all memories are allowed to remain alive, the dead are not always allowed to come back in every shade they own. Sometimes some parts of them are nothing but soft ghosts, shades of the parts they've been cobbled up into. A hand there and a thought here and laughter, laughter as light and as pure as the moon.

He sits beside her until she is done wrapping the presents. He sits beside her as her perfect hands tie bows that are much too perfect to be real, and then finishes them with a flourish. The sunlight's fluttered a little more through the curtains. Thorin stares, then, at Charlotte sleeping at her owner's feet. He seems to only have noticed her now. Some things are so normal and comforting their presence is a small afterthought in the cracking whip of burning lives. Valerie leans down to run her hand through her fur. Charlotte grumbles in her sleep and kicks her leg out. It makes Valerie smile.

“Shall I make you some early-morning hot chocolate?” his mother asks.

Then, finally, then, his face that moves, that turns to a smile so _wide_. Valerie feels something in her chest be tugged on by her own son's smile, tugged on and then unravel much too easily. She swallows, her smile never faltering. Something about seeing something so rare. Something about knowing already happiness will be all the more precious to him because more rare. She cups her son's cheeks in her hands, precious thing. If he furrows his brow at the width of her smile she doesn't care. She is filled with sunlight, sudden, sunlight as bright and as loud as her heart that's beating in her ears. She pulls Thorin in for a hug. This, this he _will_ remember, if only because his mother had the sweet smell of love all about her, tracing clouds in the daylight, tracing incantations in the air, something so purely sacred and true, something there, alive, something not even death could touch and touched.

Outside, the snow, outside the passing of time already so precious.

 


	30. xiii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for extensive discussion of pregnancy.

**SPRING 1988**

Oh, it shouldn't be as hard as she feels it'll be. What's in it, anyway? You just _pee_ on the damn thing, easy peasy. In and out. Answers given. No strings attached. Just a piece of plastic. Just the world after it and before it. A whole _lot_ of strings attached, actually. But that's something else she'll think about in a few minutes. First things first. There.

Dis inhales, exhales, and then steps into the pharmacy with a determination that is perhaps a little scary. Simple. Simple. It's _all_ simple, all fine. She didn't even think she had the BMI necessary to ovulate, let alone _conceive_. Although-- oh, her period had come back in the course of the last year, hadn't it? She'd been more kind to her body. And now this, which is why the silence is so confusing, her body retreated inside its cove again, two months skipped with no answer other than _there's something growing inside you_ , which as answers go fills her with terror and curiosity on each side, half and half filling to the brim, and when she moves the thoughts move with her, the sound of rushing water, her throat a pinhole, eyes bright.

She sighs. Again. Stands in front of the aisle she should be walking down of. Closes her eyes. Swallows. Kicks herself into gear. One step after the other. Never mind the boxes towering around her, menacing, serious, unrelenting in their stillness. Shame, perhaps, at the bottom of her tongue, leaking up from her belly. She ignores it, resolute, shoves it aside, places it in a box like the ones around her, thicker walls and not just made of cardboard. Numbness is her safest best bet, right now, numbness and a sensation of soft discomfort. She can handle those much more than love, or devotion, or starlight from her window, against Robert's back as he rests and she struggles with herself to find some sleep. All that she cannot handle, let alone think of. All that she lets wash over her like bleach.

There are boxes and boxes and rows, ways of finding out, of digging, ways of discovering your news all on your lonesome. Ways of finding out with no stress and little discomfort. None of them feel like a lifeline: each single stupid piece of plastic is tied to her feet, filled with concrete, dropped in the water with her attached. No security here. Only one thing: either or. Either yes either no. Either life spins as it usually does, or life gets a whole lot more complicated. She berates herself for the millionth time with an ache in her chest for having been foolish once or twice, for not being careful, for forgetting the condom, for not wanting to bother. It is a rage that's white-hot, sharp past her ribs. It makes her spit blood. It screams at her in a grating, terrible voice. It tells her, some nights, that dying would be better than facing the complications. She ignores that part. She has resolutely taught herself to unlearn that part, unlisten, selective deafness in the face of mad voices.

She grabs the first box she finds, doesn't read the label, places it on the counter along with a few crumpled bills. The chemist, a woman with short grey hair, with glasses, with kind brown eyes stares at her from over the line of her lenses. She blinks at Dis, curious perhaps (eyes like oil against her skin like oil like oil like shame) and notices, before anything else: the girl's downcast eyes, the girl's thin wrists, her sternum traced slightly past her skin. She rings up the price. Dis pays. Her hands are shaking. There is a little old lady in line behind her, her teenage nephew snickering over her shoulder. He can't be more than one or two years younger than she is. She swallows. She leaves. Her hands are rattling all the way into her skull.

* * *

She catches a glimpse of Thrain in the half-open door of his study. She makes sure he's got his back to the door, she makes sure he can't hear, she doesn't know why she's acting so terrified, for all intents and purposes she's just using the loo, she'll have to throw the test out separately, she'll have to find her teeth again after she's done, she'll have to scrape her skin off with a knife and hope her father never asks about the scars.

Not like he ever has.

She sits on the toilet, obedient, locks the door before she does, time's misplaced and displaced, time's relative in between these four walls with a faucet and a mirror. Only two people in this house now. How echoes in the house chase each other after the wood on the walls. A thought she pushes aside. She's often too fragmented to think straight or in lines that feel good, especially now, especially today. Sometimes it's hard to remember what is a momentary feeling compared to everything else, if she feels bad now or if she's felt bad _for a while_ , what the difference is. She closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her nose, inhales and exhales like she's taught herself.

There we go. The letters on the packaging help her concentrate: _wait fifteen minutes_. One line. Two lines. One line, no. Two lines, yes. Easy peasy. She's _eighteen_ , for Chrissakes – there's little chance she's pregnant anyway.

Right?

 _Right_?

While she waits, she thumbs the stack of magazines next to the toilet. Riding magazines, from when Frerin still lived here. A few Times issues. Even older business magazines. Yellowing paper and the crackling smell of old ink. She pulls a random one out of the pile, makes sure it doesn't topple over, and idly thumbs through it. Her wristwatch tells her only three minutes have past. When she hears footsteps, she lets the sudden peak of anxiety wash over her and then abate. Her father has only walked by, then comes the creaking down the stairs. Then she's left alone with a piece of plastic. Then she's left alone with waiting, enveloped in her own body. Sinewy bones. She stares at the veins in her hands.

Five minutes have passed.

Perhaps inside her stomach, a small kernel of anxiety becomes something heavier, more invasive. It sprouts roots. It sprouts branches and leaves, fills her veins with greenery and terror. It reaches her eyes, flowers blooming behind them. She wants time to _pass_ already. She wants time to stop and leave her be. She wants nothing to happen.

Eight minutes, and her brain is running over and over and over, a small dog trapped in its enclosing. She stares at her face in the mirror. Her April freckles are returning. Her upper lip is slightly trembling.

Twelve minutes.

Fifteen.

Two lines.

“Oh, fuck.”

 

* * *

Her mind performs a peculiar trick for the rest of the afternoon. After she's thrown out the test, after she's made sure to stuff it deep into the kitchen trash, beneath banana peels and eggshells and cans of tuna, after that, it decides she no longer needs it. Her mind decides it's more comfortable to climb above the wall, beneath her hands, to find her throat and drown it with all the rest, and then go, leave, leave her like an echo chamber of her own thoughts. So she's numb, numb at dinner, numb as her and her father exchange idle talk, numb when Balin comes over for an evening drink, when he pats her on the cheek and she pretends to smile like a human.

There is something growing inside her. It sticks to her stomach (it doesn't, not really, but it _feels_ like it – outside of her, of what she is, not part of her, like cancer, she finds herself thinking of it like cancer). It bloats her. She does not know if it is possible for her to still mourn a state of innocence, but she does. She can. She is. Here, right now. With her eyes closed. With her head in her hands. She forgot and left the door ajar, but nobody hardly ever comes into this room anyway. It's the room she died in, the reading room turned hospice room, the small sacred space she left the world from. The bed's still there, its motor long gone in disuse. It's the room she died in. Dis barely remembers the sound it made as it folded in around her corpse and became second shell second womb. The room she died in. Why she's searching for her presence in here, where the illness scrubbed away at it in their minds bit by bit, is beyond her. She should be like Thorin, and search for her with the roses. Or Frerin, who found her in the earth of the land that nurtured her to shape. But Dis, who hardly believes in God and often times finds herself observing the world from behind a disinterested windowpane of bulletproof glass, can only find her mother if she looks for her in the antiseptic smell unlocked by memories. Little else of her remains behind: perhaps a laugh, perhaps a smile. Nothing more. She's been dead almost fifteen fucking years. There's nothing _to_ find, and in the room where she died there's even less. She came here for comfort. She found nothing.

There's something inside her. She presses a hand to her belly, feels it ache and burn and so violently here, broken glass and shards of it around her, the discovery like a harpoon thrust clean through her mouth, past the back of it, past the throat past the spine past the sinews, into muscle. Eviscerated by the notion of a baby. It hunts her down with a terror she did not think she'd ever have to feel again. The last time, her brother broke her spine with a cricket bat, only it wasn't hers. It was. It wasn't. She begged him not to do it and he did it anyway. It might have well been the spine of her own trust, her own sense of agency and control, it might have been her ribs and hands and teeth. It wasn't. It still felt like it. It took far, far too long to learn to forgive herself for that. She presses her knees to the pillow against her chest, presses her face to the pillow. Baby inside her. Baby inside her. Other life to perhaps allow to live. She tries to breathe and finds out she's sobbing too hard to let it happen. It startles her into silence.

She hadn't even noticed she'd started crying. Dis swallows, uncomfortable suddenly for not the same reasons she'd been uncomfortable up to now, and she moves the pillow, stretches her legs out, stares at her knees. Her hands are in her lap. Slightly curled into a loose fist. Here, then. Here.

Her father is standing in the doorway, staring silently. She notices him last. If he looks worried, it's brief and it passes without incident. But his eyes are still fleeting when he sighs, and he does not walk away nor does he close the door.

“Is something wrong?”

He says it with the hushed tone of a man in front of a problem he is not entirely sure he can solve. Dis nods as an answer, sniffles, and then moves so she's sitting with her feet off of the bed, hands splayed on each side of them. Her knees aren't skinned and there's no upturned bicycle. Just a very, very scared young woman, her father and, between them, the complicated relationship they have come to nurture. Never really clear where either of them stands. Always very aware of the abyss between them, the sliver of land that connects them, the notion of care and shared blood. She hardly ever forgets, not anymore, what his voice sounded the day she'd cut her hair. Oh, she'd cried too hard for her to think she'd ever stop. For a moment she'd thought her eyes would burst, her throat flood with blood. It hadn't, Frerin had moved to Scotland, Thorin had moved out and she'd found herself fucking pregnant, it seems, and with having to explain to her father why she was sitting in her dead mother's room, why she was crying her eyes out. There isn't much to laugh about. She's grateful when no sarcastic, sardonic smile happens. When all she does is nod.

Instead her father prods. Gently, but he prods. He asks, “What is it?” and Dis feels like her entire jaw could be torn clean out. He is so soft with her. So much softer than he ever was with her brothers. She knows it is the curse of being born a girl, that he loves her more, listens to her more, perhaps because she is not perceived either as heir or threat. For a moment she thinks of the falsehood of affection given only out of convenience. In the split second she entertains this thought, she also reaches the conclusion that any affection she finds is enough. She loves him, he terrifies her, she terrifies him, he loves her. They are a small balancing act in a vast world in turmoil. They are a father and daughter, a widow and his dead wife's child.

She needs him as rock and foundation, right now. She needs him more than she wants to tell herself or wants to know. She needs him, even if he is towering, even if he is terrifying.

“I'm pregnant.” she says, just as softly.

There is a very short, very distinct pause.

“Ah.”

Then Thrain moves and sits on the bed beside his daughter. The dichotomy of it is not lost on him, the act of sitting on a bed that reeks of ritual and of departure: yet he ignores it in favor of his sanity and the problem now at hand. He looks at Dis for a few seconds. She stares at him, they stare at each other.

 _Pregnant_.

He reaches out to hold both of her hands. It startles her. Dis looks first at the hands like they are not attached to him and then at her father like he is not attached to them, and swallows, and her brow's furrowed.

“Come here.” he answers.

He pulls her in against himself, and she doesn't know if this is real, whatever's happening, feels like nothing. She furrows her brow more as he wraps his arms around her. A _hug_.

“...Da?”

But Thrain doesn't answer. He simply holds her, and she feels the hands on her tighten. He's _clutching her_. She blinks. She closes her eyes. If she relaxes, it's slowly, slightly. Bit by bloody, terrified bit. She whines before she notices. Her father hears. Her father, stoic incomprehensible father, he holds her, tight, against his chest, her gaze lost beyond his shoulders.

Behind them, her mother stands and watches.

* * *

He wakes up to the phone ringing. He wakes up to Dwalin saying, “I'll get it.” and his heart freezes before he remembers that this is Dwalin's flat, not his house, and so Thorin falls back onto the couch with little ceremony, with much exhaustion. He fell asleep in the jumper and pants he walked through the door in, tired to the bone, after dinner out and a few drinks, when the jet-lag and the tiredness had said, _go rest, go rest, go rest, you have flown half a world to be here_. _You've shed the shape of soldier, let yourself be man and lover._

“What time is it?” he asks, an arm thrown over his eyes. Dwalin does not answer: he's busy speaking on the phone in the entryway, nodding, the tone lets Thorin think it's Balin that he's talking to. Then comes a pause. A slightly too long pause.

Then Dwalin says, “Holy shit.” and Thorin decides to stand up and see what time it is for himself. Conveniently enough, the closest clock is in the entryway, next to the phone. On the way from the living room to there, however, there's a kitchen. He might as well pour himself a glass of water to wash the sleep out of his mouth.

By the time he's there to see the time and eavesdrop, Dwalin's already hung up the phone. He seems... oh, he has eyes Thorin can't quite place. Perhaps that is what unsettles him the most. Perhaps that's what makes him open his mouth to speak but, before he can say anything, Dwalin's there, ready with -- “Your sister's pregnant.”

His jaw closes again with a click. He swallows, hard. Takes a sip of water. Then.

“She's _what_?”

“Pregnant. She's pregnant, Thorin. Surely I don't have to explain to you how _that_ works.”

“Okay.” Thorin says plainly. There's not much else to say, right? Then it hits him.

“Oh. Oh. _Fuck_.”

“Yeah.” Dwalin is nodding emphatically, “Exactly.”

He's not entirely sure he's grasped the concept. Still he lets it stagnate. Dis. Pregnant. He has to blink.

“When did she find out?”

“Last week.”

“Was it her on the phone?”

Dwalin shakes his head. “Balin. She's there right now with Robert.”

“And?”

“She. They. They want us to come over.”

Thorin takes another sip of water. He seems caught, wide-eyed, seems floating. Dwalin watches silently and waits. He notices Thorin's hair is matted on one side, the side he slept on, there's the slight imprint of the couch on his face. He thinks about leaning over to kiss it and then thinks against it. Then Thorin sighs and turns around to put the glass in the sink back in the kitchen.

“Well then. Off we go.”

Dwalin stands in the entryway frowning a little longer. Then Thorin's head pokes in from around the corner.

“Come now. My sister's pregnant.”

His eyebrow quirks. He says it with a mix of disbelief and perhaps frustration. It's almost _almost_ bordering on comical. The arched eyebrow does it, perhaps. Dwalin stares at him for a few moments, and then half-scoffs a grunt of a disbelieving, tired laugh.

* * *

 

Tea around Balin's coffee table. The ritual has long been established, it has become fiber with the nature of their conversations. Here they are, speaking of things that matter. Here they are, and Balin's serving tea. The last time, Frerin decided to leave for Scotland. This time, Dis is pregnant.

That child will be named Fili. That child will have his grandmother's blond hair, his father's green-blue eyes. That child will laugh, and laugh, and carry goodness like fire like a kernel in his chest. Perhaps that is why the world will decide to destroy it. Perhaps the world saw something made of starlight and decided the darkness was better.

Or perhaps there is no reason, and things only happen because they do.

Dis swallows and cups her hands around the glass of water Robert has just brought her. Thorin, on the couch opposite them, watches as Robert's hands briefly rest on Dis' shoulders. She does not seem uncomfortable, but she does not seem to notice them either. She floats, like dust in the air weighed down by the truth.

She taps her foot nervously against the floor, the sound muffled by the couch. Dwalin smokes, as he's been doing more and more often when he's nervous or uncomfortable or both, and Balin no longer asks him to not smoke in the house. It is a lost battle. He lets his brother choose his poisons like he always has, and hopes the bad will not drown out the good like a landfall. He clears his throat and drags the conversation back into its rightful place, at the intersection of confession and transmission. Dis sighs at it and then takes a sip of water.

“So Father knows.”

She nods at Thorin, and takes a sip of water.

“And you're sure?”

“Yes.”

“And it's Robert's?”Dwalin says.

“ _Hey now_.”

He makes a face at Robert in response. “I just wanted to _make sure_.”

Dis rolls her eyes. “Yes. It's Robert's.”

The chair, fake leather, new, creaks under Thorin as he moves. It makes a bizarre squeaking noise. He rests his right ankle on his left knee. Thorin exhales softly. He watches his sister for a few moments, then leans forward, moves his legs, elbows on both his knees. He does not reach for his sister's free hand but wants to.

“What're you thinking of doing about it?”

His tone's changed, his tone's become a tenderness she looks at with wide blue eyes. The surprises he yields. The ways she always seems to find him in the cracks she least expected. She remembers an old conversation had outside, as the snow started to fall, as they found each other's hands in the backs of their memories. How strange. How strange to think that you're alone and then wake up one morning surrounded by endless, boundless, incomprehensible love. Love willing to kill for you. Love willing to rip out a man's throat.

 _What're you thinking of doing about it_.

The word abortion sticks too close to her sternum, threatens far too much to sink through the bone and poison her heart.

She shrugs.

“I don't know. I don't know. I don't know yet.”

Thorin nods and Robert does too.

“That's okay, for now. I think. How far are you?”

“Doctor appointment is next week.”

“And you said Father knows?”

“Yes.”

“What has he said about it?”

Dis' smile is between sardonic and resolved: “That we should get married.”

Dwalin lets out a whistle. Thorin drops his hand on his knee briefly to silence him, and then pulls it away. Suspended in the knowing-not-knowing. He pulls his hand away, an instant, and the instant hollows out the light for a moment. Dis sees the hand and sees it and then doesn't care again. She's pregnant. She's eighteen. She doesn't care much about her brother and his anxieties. Right now. She feels exhausted all of a sudden.

“I wanna tell Frerin before I make any proper decision.”

Thorin nods, “Sure. Phone him anytime, I don't see why--”

“No. I want to go there.”

“In _person_ , you mean?”

“Yes.”

Thorin opens and closes his mouth. He looks over his shoulder, at Balin, and then at Robert in front of him. _They already look married_ he finds himself thinking, the way his sister clutches Robert's hand on her shoulder. Dwalin nods. _Sure_ he says, with a drag of his cigarette and a small scoff. Balin doesn't say anything. He can tell by how Robert leans down to whisper something in his sister's ear that they've already discussed this, and he thinks it's better. For the better. He's glad she has Robert. He's glad Robert's found her.

“I'm on leave for another week.”Thorin says, and then shrugs. “So why not?”

 


	31. xiv

The car against his back. He stares at the concrete of the parking lot. Dwalin in front of him, white shirt, tight black jeans, combat boots. Thorin's wearing the jacket he gave him, as he has for the last five and a half years. Dwalin watches him with a softness made of love, and he catches the last of it as Dwalin averts his gaze from him to light his cigarette. He smiles as an answer, his eyes blue, dazzling, in the light. Dwalin doesn't see it until he looks back up, and then smiles in return. He offers a cigarette to him. Thorin takes it, and his eyes anchor to the tips of Dwalin's fingers as they hold the lighter. He plucks it out of his hands before he can put it away.

“This one's new.”

A zippo. Pretty thing.

“When did you buy it?”

“Sometime over the last few months.”

Thorin observes it, turns it around in his fingers. The thorns carved along the sides. The rose. He scrapes at the silver coating with a nail, makes no real damage, lets the presence of the object be known to himself, to his body.

“Watch it.”

“I _am_ , no worries.”

He opens it, lights it, realizes he is focusing on the lighter to ignore the gnawing need to kiss him. Not here. Not in public. Not raw and open for the world to see. A piece of Dwalin in his hands then so he can pretend he's holding him. His heart flutters uncomfortably.

Dis comes out of the rest stop holding a bottle of water. He snaps the lighter shut so suddenly he nearly drops it, and then hands it back to Dwalin. He swallows hard when their hands touch, palms clammy, (this is as bad as when you first fell in love) and Dwalin arches an eyebrow at him. It's the extent of his question. Thorin ignores it and instead opens the car door for Dis. She sits in the back seat, and Thorin takes the driver's. Dwalin beside him.

“Quick, let's leave before Robert comes back.” Dis says, deadpan, from behind her sunglasses.

Then she snorts, half-laughs at her own joke.

“How's the nausea?”

“Wonderful. Cream cracker?”

“No, thank you.”

Dwalin on the other hand gladly takes a few from the package. A crumb gets caught in the corner of his mouth. Thorin notices before Dwalin does, and takes the chance to brush it off with his thumb. It's a brief, soft gesture, like the sunlight that's dripping in past the clouds past the windshield. Thorin feels Dwalin's eyes on him, feels them trace his cheekbone with a knuckle. He lowers his hand. The liminal space of the parking lot, the bodies that they know and have learned to love, the terror of the open, the breeze of the unknown. The car door behind them opens: Robert clambers into the seat next to Dis, packet of crisps in hand. Dis rests her shoulder on his: in Dwalin's mind the photograph of a memory taking shape – her closed eyes, Robert's gaze along the egde of the parking lot as Thorin starts the car wordlessly. And Thorin.

Thorin

Thorin, driving with that serious expression of his, Thorin who notices Dwalin's gaze as it continues across the plane of his neck, the curve of his jawline. Thorin who raises a smile in triumph. There is nothing to celebrate, save for things in the cavity of his heart as they grow a little softer.

* * *

Frerin hears the sound of rain before he hears anything else, before he is aware again that he breathes. It kisses the roof, he hears the leak as it drips through the air, passes past the surface of the table. He absent-mindedly takes a jar and places it there, the circle in the sky, from the top it is a pocket of ocean filling with clouds. From the rafters, his face and his furrowed brow as he watches the rain drip into the home for a few instants. He lets it fill and fill slowly so, and then empties it, and lets it fill again. His knitting comes slowly too, flows like a river: a life made of metaphors the shape of water. The clicking. The needles. Like teeth. Like the small steps of mice hiding between the walls. His low, absent-minded humming. Then the sound of a car as it pulls up into the driveway, as the gravel dances with rain dances with tires. He looks up towards the windows that give to the driveway.

Thorin wakes up when the car stops, curled in the passenger seat. Dwalin wakes him by running the back of his hand, slowly, along the side of his face. Stubble against skin. Robert is asleep, too. Dis stares at her brother and at Dwalin, still and perfectly silent. Thorin wakes up with a jolt, and Dis pretends to sleep too. She nestles her head back against Robert's chest. She closes her eyes. In the dark, the image of Dwalin touching her brother like pale ghosts of a thought.

“We're here.”

A soft voice, that Thorin hears past his bleary eyes. He smiles, and he yawns, stretches. He reaches over the back of his seat to shake Dis awake with that sort of playful roughness big brothers always have. She sees him move out of the corner of her half-lidded eye and moves the moment before he can touch her. Eyes wide open.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Driver says we're here.”

She swallows hard. Robert moves awake, and then all four are here and present. Dis, small in her own sudden terror: emotions can be so big sometimes, so hard and hard to breathe with. Dis, biting her lower lip. She sees the front door open and then her stomach gives up into her throat, a building crumbling as the earthquake takes it. He's gained weight. His hair's longer. Standing right inside so the rain can't find him. Oh but it's him. But it's home. But he's here, glasses and all, heart and all.

He recognizes the car, sees it as Balin's trusty yellow car, sees it and then sees who's inside. He exhales hard enough for it to be visible, the curve of his shoulders, the slope of his body taken by surprise.

Dis mutters his name, Dis throws the car door open. Frerin sees all he has to see: the eyes the hair the face, the hair dark like his own like their brother's. Rain forgotten, rain as slippery and malleable as love. Rain be damned: he leaves the protection of the entryway to find unsteady ground in his bare feet, Frerin runs, the puddles he crosses like seas to be parted.

And then she's in his arms, his hands pulling her close, hair stuck to his forehead, her face buried in his chest, his body there to wrap her closer to him. Here. The rain around them dancing. Here, here, here. His laugh choked by tears hiding beneath his larynx. Her smile, shattering thing, her eyes as he pulls her back to hold her face, her hands wrapped around his wrists. His smile. She swallows past the tears. His smile. His smile. The song of the earth that embraces them.

“I'm here,” she says, and that's all she says. Frerin's nodding, “I know, I know, I know.”

“I'm here, Frer.”

“I _know_.”

 

* * *

Against her spine, then, she feels his warmth like a whisper.

Against her spine. Soft. Soft, oh like sunlight only _solid_. She turns around and there's a breath at the bottom. His back to her face, her smile, his soft breathing turning softer still when she wakes him. She wraps her arms around his chest, his hands find hers. A beat of silence. She grins against his shoulder, the dust of freckles she catches a glimpse of past the residue of sleep still clouding her eyes. He turns them, turns himself so he's on his back and pulls her so she's on top. The sheet falls from her shoulders. It's just the morning then, the sound of rain, clothing her, the last of whatever dream she had. She floats in the morning and the air of rainy spring seeping from the window. Her eyes shine bright, her lips the taste of the strawberries they had after dinner. He tastes them again when she leans down to kiss him. Her hair brushing against her throat. She smiles, smiles wide and says nothing: just laughs. His hands, rough and warm, to her hips, holding her. Nothing more. Just holding. Her forehead to his. Then comes his low laugh, the rough of the last of the autumn leaves, against her lips. He moves them again, and she's on her back, he's on top, his hands to hers, one hand to hers, the other to her hip and then tracing lazy circles around her nipple.

She shivers, and then grins, and then laces her hands in his hair when it's no longer his fingers against her-- when it's his lips, and the grin turns to a sigh. Lower still. She curls her toes, curls her nose when she smiles.

There's a knock on the door. Asunn sees Dain's head pop up and, in the light as it falls from the window, notices his red hair's starting to be stained with grey. There is a fleck of white in his beard. She sees those things both, and suddenly her heart swells with affection for him: it's so deep it makes her almost recoil. It permeates her, every inch, seeps into her blood and flows through her through it. She swallows. She welcomes the second knock on the door like a necessary distraction, like the saving grace from being overwhelmed. Oh, who knew. Who knew. She grabs Dain's hand with hers, without thinking: all heart, all _need_ , all necessity and want.

“Can it wait, Frer?” Dain asks directly. Honest. Behind the door, Frerin sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose.

“I mean, it _might_ , but my family's just pulled up in the car.'

A pause. Asunn mouths _what_ but Dain's already looked away and back at the door again.

“...including your father?”

The millisecond pause to roll his eyes. Frerin scoffs. “No.”

“Then _who_?”

“Dis, Robert, Dwalin, Thorin.”

He says their names like he's reading off a shopping list. Asunn arches an eyebrow. Dain gets up and crosses the room, balances on the back of his chair with a hand to grab his robe. He ties it, balancing against the edge of the vanity. Asunn chooses a shirt of his, the one on the floor she took off him, notices the oil stain on the collar when it's too late. She wraps herself in flannel and breathes him in. The thoughts, the earlier thoughts, the grey that she saw, flood her still, are starting to dissipate. They become the breeze in the lakeside grass, the torment of a woodpecker on a lazy summer. Nothing more. Nothing less. Perhaps something like an afterthought.

“We'll be down in a moment, kid.”

“Suit yourselves.”

Then the shuffling sound of footsteps as Frerin walks away, back downstairs.

“What do you think's going on?”

“Maybe Thrain's finally kicked the bucket.”

She ducks the pillow he throws at her, and grins. Redhead mischief, her trickster eyes that sparkle.

“ _What_? As if it wouldn't be reason to celebrate.”

But all Dain does is shake his head and scoff, She's still smiling. She's braiding her hair, she'll keep it like that for the rest of the day. The freckles on the bridge of her nose. He'd called them stars once when he was drunk. She'd laughed. She'd laughed.

“Wait. For a moment.”

She does. But, “Don't go soft on me.”

“I'm _not_.” he lies, and lets his eyes wash along her face, the pitter-patter of rain on the skylight. He sits on the chair by his desk, and then picks up his crutches.

“C'mon. Let's go downstairs and see what all the fuss' about.”

They find them: Frerin sitting on one of the stools around the kitchen table, Dis on the one opposite him, her feet tucked behind the feet of it, Robert at the other end. Dwalin turns from the open fridge, Thorin standing next to him, arms crossed. But Dwalin sees both Dain and Asunn and spreads his arms, grinning wide and glorious. His mouth is full of cheese. Asunn laughs, and so does Dain. Their reunion reeks less of desperation compared to Frerin and Dis', theirs the lull of love that has become used to the absence and knows the comfort of reunion, not the terror of the endless stretch of need. Dain shakes Thorin's hand, Asunn asks for a hug by hugging him, leaving no space to answer. She pats his chest.

“You've filled in.”

It brings an awkward cough, a “Guess so.” Good enough. He will ask Dwalin later how long this has been happening for, when they're alone beneath the blanket, where the whispers are theirs soft and precious. For now he just accepts Asunn wearing a shirt that is clearly Dain's, and agrees with himself that there are things that he doesn't have to understand immediately.

Dain moves to the kitchen. Dis reaches for Frerin's hand across the wood and laces their fingers together. A soft squeeze. The earth that finds the drowning girl again. He smiles, and smiles, and smiles so wide – Dis thinks his face will split in two and she is _glad_ to see that. Robert beside her, pressing a soft kiss to her temple. That makes her smile, too, and she closes her eyes to bask in it.

Asunn sits down and Dain sets the kettle to boil.

“Who wants tea, then?”

Five hands shoot up: Dis, Robert, Frerin, Asunn, Thorin. Dain nods, takes the count, and it's Frerin who moves to pick out the mugs. They're all mismatched, a few are chipped. They carry home in the ceramic and china they're made of. Dis picks one the colour of periwinkle, and Frerin smiles as he hands it to her.

“Grab one for me too, dear,” Dain says, which he does. He stares for a moment at Thorin, and sees Dwalin behind him. But his eyes fall to Thorin, the bridge of his nose. Thorin notices, Thorin takes the gaze an lets it bloom. He had ignored him up to that moment. When he hands him his mug, their fingers touch, and Frerin swallows briskly and hard. He sniffles. He hesitates. Then he gives Thorin's upper arm a brief squeeze.

He shuffles back to sit down.

Thorin smiles.

Dain sets a box down onto the table, wooden, full of teabags and packets of loose-leaf tea.

“Suit yourselves,” as the water heats up.

“So,” Asunn starts, her legs folded beneath her body as she perches on the stool, “to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

She glances, grinning, from Dis to Robert to Thorin and Dwalin. Dwalin exhales slowly, looks away and at his feet, arms crossed in front of his chest. Dis swallows, clenches and unclenches her firsts. Her hands splayed on the wood.

“Dee, what's wrong?” Frerin asks immediately. She shakes her head. Doesn't close her eyes when Robert wraps an arm around her shoulders. She thinks about telling him when they're alone. She thinks about telling him right now, surrounded by this forest of souls. So many, so many people. She thinks about telling him never, in the dead of night, she thinks of telling him when they'll both be dead. She thinks of telling him and then not telling him at all.

Oh. _Fuck it_..

“I'm pregnant.”

The pause between the words and the thought. Frerin exhales slowly and leans back. His chair creaks. Dain takes the kettle off the burner and sets it onto the table and knows nobody will drink any of the tea. He sits down, and he waits. Asunn stares intently at the table. The moment expands. It becomes heavier and heavier, intertwined with silence. It waits the moment to burst.

It doesn't.

Then it does.

“Did you come all this way just to tell me that?”

His jaw clenches and her eyes never leave his face. His are in her throat. Then they're not. Then they're in hers. She can feel a tremor in her hands she does not want, not when speaking to Frerin of all people.

“Yes.”

Another pause. He picks at the sleeve of his sweater. More silence. Everyone around them an accessory to conversation, less than family, more than relatives, just presences. He couldn't care less for any of them. Her eyes are wide and blue, and she cannot read his expression. But she can read the sharp beneath the words, the curl of a biting tone like a blade. He's upset, miffed, uncomfortable. Angry is not a word she'd use. Maybe it's the word she should use.

“And I'm assuming you're not aborting it, since you're telling me about it.”

“No.”

“How much do you weigh, Dee?”

She blinks. “What?”

“You know what I asked.”

“ _Frerin_.” Thorin snaps and all he gets is a glare. She glares, too, because he's intruded, because this is their conversation, Thorin already knows about it anyway. It's not his place to speak.

“Doctor thinks I weigh enough to carry it to term. If I'm careful.”

Frerin rubs his eyes. He inhales, “You're _eighteen_.”

“I know.”

“Dee.”

“Frerin, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish. I've already made my decision. I'm keeping the child, and I'm marrying Robert. You have no say in this.”

“Think about it. Dee. You're barely out of uni ye--”

“No. It's _my_ body. _My child_. It's _my_ decisions, and you can't say anything about it.”

She retracts inside herself after she's spoken, keeps the rest of her words in her skull locked safe and tight. “None of you do. Just me.”

Frerin stands up. It makes Dis sigh. She calls his name. He doesn't answer. “It's raining, Frerin,” Thorin says, as if it's good enough to keep him inside. The door slamming makes Dis jump. A momentary thing.

Then she feels the tears and hates them. Instead she laughs, bitter. Closes her eyes and furrows her brow.

“Well. That went much worse than I thought.”

A long, hard sniffle. Robert wrapping her in his arms. It makes her smile, cling to him. There. Tears and happiness. His silence so important sometimes she can hardly wrap her own hands around it. He will walk in their house in London with their child in his arms, and he is twenty-five, she's eighteen, the world open to their hands.

“He'll come around.” Thorin offers as a meager explanation, laughable comfort. Dis gives Thorin a look, but Frerin will. Life will leave a small newborn baby in Frerin's arms with his mother's blond hair, and any fear and reservations about its existence in a world so cruel and full of dark, burning anger will be _gone_ , drowned down like he is drowning his own terror in the rain right now, five months earlier. He presses his hands to his temples and bears _down_ , until it's tight and feels like his brain is on the verge of bursting from his nose. The rain, sticking his hair to his skull. One breath. Two. The chaos inside of him is a mass, sticky and devouring, hard and difficult to understand right now. He swallows it down and spits it back out in front of his eyes. _What am I scared of_? What is there that's so terrifying about all of this? He stares at the mud. Rain roaring in his ears. Empty words. The space where the answer should be. There's nothing _to_ be scared of, nothing that isn't--

He should learn how to give her her body back. She no longer needs his carcass to protect her. Perhaps that's what he's scared of: the awareness of not being wanted. Letting something go that no longer needs him. Needs him in another way. She needs a brother and a friend, not a shield.

He turns to look at the door.

He opens it. Knows they are staring. Stands on the threshold between here and there, between anger and an apology, and discovers himself growing more and more in love with the latter than the former. Anger that had been resting: a dragon rearing its head so suddenly, a dragon he had not listened to in a while. Father. Dis who is fragile. His own endless sadness. Thorin and the mad dash and dance he was caught in. What an animal indeed. Perhaps because its roar was the loudest, he found that vanquishing it took only this: Frerin closes the door and sees Robert holding his sister.

“Hey.”

Everyone staring at him.

“Dee.”

She turns too, Robert's arms around her melting away.

“I'm sorry.”

For what? For too much. For his sudden outburst. For starting heroin. For forgetting how it felt to be alive. For abandoning her. For not knowing how to be a brother and not just a ghost. For being himself. Perhaps the last part he should not feel sorry for. He feels sorry for it anyway.

His hard, bleeding swallow. Her soft forgiving smile that if it could would break his kneecaps and force him to crawl on the ground like the penitent he deserves to be. Perhaps a year ago he would have never showed himself this kindness, here, this willingness to know he is deserving of forgiveness.

“I know.” she says low. It is enough.

 

* * *

Thorin absent-mindedly kicks a rock and tries to dislodge it from the mud it's trapped in. It does very little – mostly splatters his foot with brown. He pays it little attention, even less affection, at least it's stopped raining. He turns slightly to look over his shoulder and smile at Dwalin, who's trudging behind him, hands in his pockets.

He smiles back, though, and Thorin stops to wait for him. He outstretches a hand. Dwalin takes a moment to seem puzzled by it, and then takes it. He lets his eyes scan Thorin's face, picks at the expressions he can read there.

“Moving out has made you bold.”

Thorin shrugs. He lets go of Dwalin's hand and starts walking again. This time, Dwalin's beside him. He turns then to walk backwards, throws glances over his shoulder every now and then to make sure that he's not running into anything.

He sees Dwalin watch him with eyes full of wonder. It makes him stop again.

Between them and the greenery around them, the walk they took to catch a moment's breath. The smell of the earth, rich and dark. Full earth. Something poetic about the world and its rebirth. A fraction of it is inside him already, perhaps a tenth of that: the rest is for a moment the gaze Dwalin gives him. Like evisceration. Few things as beautiful, as terrifying as fucking humbling. Few things sewn in the back of his hands like this one, right here. Grey eyes, blue eyes.

“Come here.” Thorin whispers, but he is already walking towards Dwalin when he says it. Their kiss tastes of the day they spent wanting it. Their kiss lasts all the time they need it to: once, twice, a third time lips pressed to lips.

 _Has made you bold_.

Thorin has taught himself the art of drowning, before that the art of falling. The art of being brave has trickled into him softly bit by bit. He's learned it as he learned to talk and breathe: learned it when he found the tiles and slotted them in place. His forehead pressed to Dwalin's, his eyes not ready to be open yet. His low hum. He swallows the sound of it. Then he pulls back, arms resting on Dwalin's shoulders, fingers loosely caught in the back of his mohawk. He simply watches. It makes Dwalin half-smile, and it does not make Thorin want to stop looking. The tip of a finger, softly, along Dwalin's scar. The poetry of the gesture has changed, become a touch of binding rock, of solid bond, less of a confession made in the dead of night, more of a thought – to _be here_ , to be _alive_ , to be with him. He stops at the beginning of Dwalin's upper lip. He lingers there, his touch like a joint fitting snugly in its bone, filling the space it must, holding the way it has to. The spell holds in the low rustle of Dwalin's breathing. Then he moves his hand.

The mud path slowly turns to gravel as they walk back towards the farm, finish the loop of their walk. From the slope of the hill they can see the smoke from the chimney, the chicken coop beside the house, the barn across the courtyard, towards the back, the cars in front of the house: Balin's yellow box, Dain's truck. Thorin feels a tug, like he doesn't want to go back inside. He turns to look at Dwalin who's standing next to him and setting out to light a cigarette.

“Come live with me.”

Dwalin gets as far as pulling the pack out of his jacket pocket. Then it feels a bit too little important, compared to the rest of it. Compared to what's just been said.

Come. Come. _Come live with me_.

He then pulls out a cigarette. There. Grants himself the small mercy of a moment to think. Perhaps Thorin meant to say _marry me_. Perhaps that's what he meant to say, and it came out in the shape of _come live with me_.

Does it matter what shape it carries, when the heart shines the way it does?

Dwalin doesn't light his cigarette. He lets it rest, safe between his lips. He reaches for Thorin's hand, wraps it in his, threads their fingers together.

Perhaps he meant to say _yes_. Perhaps that's what he meant to say, and it came out in the shape of his hand, reaching, and holding, and whispering the word over, and over, and over. A million times over. Three times.

_Yes._

_Yes._

_Yes._

I do.


End file.
